Vista won't use 2nd IDE drive

[Guest]

Old System:

a. 80 GB - Win XP SP2
b. 160 GB (IDE) - Data files

New System:

a. 160 GB - Vista Home Premium
b. 160 GB (IDE) - Data files

After swapping the a. drives and putting Vista on the new one, Vista sees
the b. drive in disk managment but can't bring it online or assign a drive
letter to make is usable.

What would causethis and how can it be fixed? The 160 (b.) drive has 100 GB
of data on it and can't be reformatted.

Help!

 

[Gary G. Little]

Well ... you ain't gonna like it, but to use it, you will have to assign it
a drive letter and that basically means creating a new volume which means
formatting the drive. If you can, boot to the 80GB drive and save everything
on B, then go back to the Vista boot drive and restore it. If you have
ShadowProtect Desktop, or willing to try the trial version at
storagecraft.com, you can image b, boot to Vista and install ShadowProtect,
then resotre b after creating the volume.

You MIGHT try booting to the XP repair console and copying the files on b to
a, though I suspect Vista is going to block that. Vista has a repair console
also that could be worth trying. Most anything you do is going to require
copious amounts of storage space, so it most likely is time to break out, or
invest in, a USB HDD.

 

[Jon]

Old System:

a. 80 GB - Win XP SP2
b. 160 GB (IDE) - Data files

New System:

a. 160 GB - Vista Home Premium
b. 160 GB (IDE) - Data files

After swapping the a. drives and putting Vista on the new one, Vista sees
the b. drive in disk managment but can't bring it online or assign a drive
letter to make is usable.

What would causethis and how can it be fixed? The 160 (b.) drive has 100
GB
of data on it and can't be reformatted.

Help!

Your data disc 'b' may have been formatted as a dynamic disc, as opposed to
a basic disc - the gist of which (I believe) means you'd need to reinstall
XP on your 'a' disc (or a partition of it) to gain access to your data. You
could perhaps shrink down your Vista Partition to achieve that / put an XP
partition on it.

 

[R. C. White]

Hi, Ken.

What DOES Disk Management say about your second HD?

I've been using Disk Management ever since it was introduced in Windows
2000. And I've dual-booted several varieties of Win2K/WinXP/Vista, sharing
data disks on several hard disk drives among them. Your problem should be
pretty easy to resolve - and should not involve formatting that drive.

First, tell us everything that DM says about that HDD. Is it "Disk 1"? Is
it all a single primary partition? Is it formatted NTFS? What does it say
in the "Type" column? Is it "Basic"? What does it say in the "Status"
column? There may be several "Statuses" listed; please tell us all of them.

How did you install Vista? Was this a new computer, with OEM Vista
pre-installed, into which you moved your old data drive? Or did you swap
out the first hard drive in your existing computer? Were the old OS drives
IDE, SATA, or some other interface?

In Disk Management, click Help | Help Topics. This Help file is organized
from many, so it takes a little getting used to, but it is chock full of
information! Click the Search tab, then type in "foreign" and click List
Topics. Highlight the first topic, "Troubleshooting Disk Management", and
press Enter to see a page asking, "What problem are you having?" See if
something on this page provides some clues. For example, "The Foreign
status occurs when you move a dynamic disk to the local computer from
another computer running Windows 2000, Windows XP Professional, ..."

RC
--
R. C. White, CPA
San Marcos, TX
(e-mail address removed)
Microsoft Windows MVP
(Running Windows Live Mail beta in Vista Ultimate x64)

 

[Jane C]

Hello Ken,

If your second drive is a dynamic disk, then Home Premium cannot use it.
Home Editions of Vista do not support dynamic disks.