Problem Accessing Separate Drive with Vista 32 Installe

l337Vader · 15 Aug 2009

I have 2 identical drives in my computer. Prior to Windows 7, I had Vista 32 Ultimate installed on drive 1. Drive 2 was used a backup drive.

I have now installed Windows 7 64 on drive 2. To make absolutely sure I didnt screw up my vista installation I removed drive 1 with vista on it from my pc.

I got Windows 7 up and running with no problems on drive 2 by doing a clean install by reformatting the entire drive, then reconnected drive 1 with Vista 32 installed. I can easily control which one I boot up by changing boot order in CMOS. This was done instead of having multiple boot partitions on a single driver for a few different reasons.

With both drives in and booted up under Windows 7 64, I am trying to access the data files on Vista 32. Unfortunately I dont have a drive letter for the vista 32 drive. I went into disk management to give it a drive letter, but I get an error message when I select drive letter. See attached image.

I tried refreshing and trying again but keep getting same error.

Is it possible to access the Data on the other drive under a NTFS partition? I did set the folders I wanted to access as viewable by everyone. the problem is I cant get a drive letter to the disk.

Help ?

Night Hawk · 15 Aug 2009

Welcome to the Se7enfourms! 1337Vader

Simply unplugging the data cable from the Vista drive would have been enough to prevent any detection and placement of 7 boot entries on the Vista drive there. Upon replugging in the drive for some reason 7 didn't mount it fully where you could assign a logical drive letter to it.

What you have to do now is intialize the Vista drive while in the Disk Management tool. When right clicking on the Vista drive item seen there you should see the option for that unless the drive is already initialized. Once that is done you will likely need to restart the system before you can assign a letter to it.

l337Vader · 16 Aug 2009

I don't see an option available to initialize. There is a screen shot of the acutal disk manager screen attached.

If I right click the drive space area, anything I choose results in the error message.

If I right click the small "Disk 1" box to the left of the drive space the only options I have are "Convert to Dynamic Disk", "Offline", and "Properties".

I can choose Properties here and it says the device is working properly.

Any other clues?

Night Hawk · 16 Aug 2009

The next thing to try right off would be going to the menu bar>actions and clicking the rescan option in the dropdown list there. For some reason the existing Vista primary on Drive #1 seen there isn't being properly detected and mounted while 7 is still detecting a working drive.

When removing the drive did you change sata ports by chance when replugging it back in? That's if those are sata models. It sounds like Windows is trying while something still isn't right like a bad port for sata or even a shaky data cable unless the power plug was ???