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Vista SATA Drive Offline

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5 replies

by crsinclair

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I have just installed Vista Home Premium on one of my two SATA drives. However, when in Vista I cannot access the other drive. In Disk Management it is displayed as a Dynamic drive which is offline, but I do not have the option to put it back online. The drive is also visible through Device Manager.

I do not want to format this drive as it contains a lot of valuable data.

Thanks in advance,

5 replies

by hal 9000

Fit it to a XP computer with SATA Drivers and Backup your data from there.

As things stand Vista needs to format the drive which will result in the loss of data so that it is usable with Vista. Similarly if you want to return the system to XP you need to wipe the HDD with Vista on it as Vista makes it impossible to reinstall XP onto any drive that has been running Vista.

You can wipe the boot drive with something like Boot & Nuke available for download here

http://tinyurl.com/4rfur

Or you can ring M$ Technical Support and ask them how to resolve this issue but if you have an OEM Copy they are quite likely to bill you for the advice. However if you have the Upgrade Version of Vista M$ Technical Support has to offer you an answer.

Or you can ask at the Windows Vista Community a M$ run Web Site here

http://tinyurl.com/yt8adb

Col

by intrepi

It's been awhile but I remember a similar thing with Windows 2000 Pro where I had to go through 4 pages of instructions to get it off my drive.
Vista is like an arc weld, easier to put on than get off. It really anchors deep into the MBR or the initial boot area of the drive. If you have Vista installed or pre installed on a drive, I'd highly recommend leaving it on the drive. Leave the drive inside if it's a desktop and disconnect the input/output cable as it would be easier to buy and install a new drive then load XP on it.

by twitchmonkey

Sadly, Microsoft has decided to disable dynamic partitions in all version of Vista Home.

Here's the 'Haha, got you' kbase article.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/927520

You'd think they'd mention that somewhere to prospective buyers. You're stuck either re-installing XP and breaking your drive apart and then re-installing XP, or spending $160 to perform their update to Ultimate.

Gotta love it.

by binarypc

My system was Vista Ultimate from the beginning. It just decided one day to drop the second SATA drive from the loop. I'm going to try reinstalling Vista Ult to see if it recognizes it, but heck, its not cool.

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