OK here's my situation. I've got windows vista ultimate installed on my computer and I accidentally converted my one and only hard drive into a dynamic disk. I did a little research and found dskprobe.exe, but thing of it is it doesn't see the physical drive nor will it let me open the logical C: drive. What can be done to convert it back to a basic drive with out loosing all my data?

Or would this work: Shrink the Vista partition down enough to create a linux partition, migrate the files I want to save onto the linux partition, reinstall Vista, migrate the files from the linux partition back to the new vista install, remove the linux partition and finally expand the vista partition back to it's regular size.

P.S. A quick question that is off topic: When upgrading to vista without a key when I go to buy the key does it need to be an upgrade key or a installation key/