Converting Basic Disk to Dynamic Disk Stripped SMB Shares

We experienced a very interesting problem on a Windows Server 2003 file server in which all SMB shares were removed from the file server upon reboot.  We were in the process of moving a data volume from a Raw Device Mapping (RDM) to a VMDK virtual disk file in VMware.  To achieve this we were going to perform the following tasks within the virtual machine:

1. Present a new VMDK to the Virtual Machine
2. Convert the NTFS Volume from Basic to Dynamic
3. Create a Software RAID1 Mirror between the RDM and VMDK volumes
4. Allow for Windows Software Raid to replicate the data
5. Remove the RAID1 Mirror for the RDM volume.

Upon converting the basic volume to a dynamic volume, Windows Server 2003 asked to reboot the server.  Upon reboot, all SMB shares on the file server automatically removed themselves.  There were hundreds of shares and as a result users could not get access to resources.

To recover the shares we simply restored the system registry which can be achieved through performing a system state restore.  Windows stores all SMB shares under the following location in the registry:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\LanmanServer\Shares

We found the following Symantec article very helpful during this procedure:

http://www.symantec.com/business/support/index?page=content&id=TECH159845