After installation, returning to XP with spanned set

[Guest]

I thought I was at least moderatly careful, I installed Vista on a clean
drive and kept my other drives physically disconnected while installing. Upon
completion I hooked them up so I could access them which worked fine, it saw
my 18 GB System/Root drive for XP and even my spanned set, although it didn't
want to reactivate it completely, I had to choose to import foreign disks on
two of the volumes.

Now, unhooking the Vista drive and booting from the XP drive again I come as
far as XP loading and going through all the listed DLL:s in safe mode, and
then it bluescreens - no explanation given in the BSOD either except an error
code.

So, I started the recovery console on the XP CD, and:

- Checkdisk does not want to touch the volume
- FixMBR did state it was unknown and I replaced it - didn't help
- Fixboot said it could not recognize any partition.

Using diskpart it could at least see both volumes.

Booting into Vista again I can still access the drives though, so I will be
able to back up my root disk, however my 850 gig spanned set will probably go
lost.

I've read forums and checked around, the only thing I can say is that I
don't think the Vista boot loader is on the XP boot disk - at least
VistaBootPro only looks at the Vista drive, and there's none of the expected
Vista bootfiles on that drive either. (Although there is the Vista recycle
bin files on the spanned set)

I tried Acronis Disk Director on the drive and it found NO partitions, and
Paragon Partition Manager refuses to start in Vista.

Any good suggestions? I am at a loss as to what my next step should be. Dare
I reinstall XP on the first partition and hope that the spanned set survives?

Drive structure:

300 GB system/boot drive. S-ATA, dynamic drive . Boot/system partition of 15
GB, the rest is part of the spanned set.
2*200 GB on a Silicon Image S-ATA RAID 0. Dynamic drive, part of the spanned
set
1*250 GB P-ATA. Spanned set. Dynamic drive.
1*80 GB Vista system/boot drive.

/ Broken Haiku

 

[Dave Johnson]

Hi

I'm afraid I can't offer any help, but I can sympathize. I have made the
same error as yourself - trusting the 'import foreign disk' function on a
data and a system drive - with the same results.

I do note that the 'map' function on the recovery console lists my drives,
but they are mapped to '?' rather than a drive letter. Now if only there was
a 'mount' facility...

I'm going to have to reintall XP and hope that I can then reimport my data
disk into it - which is bound to be listed as a foreign disk by that point.

Dave