Dynamic Disks - Winxp - Data recovery?

[Divenow]

OK - never played with Windows Dynamic Disks befroe but I have a friend who has setup his computer with this over 4 HDD's. His system OS, Windows XP has failed and needs to be reinstalled.

We'd like to revert back to basic disks and install the OS on the fastest drive which is the SATA 120GB, previously used for storage dump. This has a whooping 444Mb shown as used in properties in Disk Management. Problem is I can't access this data to backup by viewing it in my machine, running data recovery demos I get shown the contents of the system drive (WINDOWS, PROGRAM FILES, DOCUMENTS AND SETTINGS etc) and not the data that was originally stored. Anyone have any ideas?






Altyernatively if we have to reinstall WinXP on the original dynamic disk replacing the previous will it pick up the other dynamic disks allowing us access?

Thanks for any help.