Ext Sata drive from XP invalid in Vista

[gleclerc]

I have two computers, one running Vista Home Premium, the other running Windows XP Pro, SP2. THis morning in ended up with a hammered system because of virus and trojans etc., the system has two external Sata drives on it and I had done some backing up of stuff prior to all of this. I've decided that I will burn the system down and reinstall windows XP on it again. At the same time I will update the video, ps and maybe even the processor, so the bottom line, it's not all bad as it could use a good rebuild.

Anyway, those two external Sata drives, when I hook them to my Vista machine as external sata the drives show up in Disk Management as Dynamic and Invalid. There is a little red arrow pointing down on the drive symbol.

So - the question is obvious, what is going on here, why can't Vista deal with these drives? Oh and they are NTFS as are my Vista drives.

I want to move some files off these drives onto my Vista Machine.

Thanks,

Gene

 

[akhilles]

Could be a permission issue. Use XP to check out the properties of the problematic drive. Look at the Security tab. While you're at it, do a full disk scan. It's in the Tools tab. Should be fine with Vista.

The best solution would be NAS - drive on network. Nowhere near as fast as eSATA.

 

[Old Hippie]

when I hook them to my Vista machine as external sata the drives show up in Disk Management as Dynamic and Invalid

Looks like someone formatted them as dynamic disks in your XP machine, which you definately didn't want to do. Seems only Vista Ultimate can read dynamic disks.

AFAIK, you can't convert back to a basic disks, which Vista can read, without losing all your data.

You'll want to copy all your needed data to a basic formatted disk while in your XP machine, and then do the transfer.

In the future, stay away from dynamic disks.

Good Luck!

 

[gleclerc]

Old Hippie,

I suspect you're right but since they are/were external and I didn't consider them anything other than dyanamic, that's what I did with them. The xp machine that they were on has gone south now but not before I did a complete backup to one of the external sata drives. What I guess I'll do is wait until I get the xp machine up and running and then use them to restore the data I want. Then I can reformat them fixed I guess. My vista is Home Pre, not ultimate.

Thanks

 

[gleclerc]

The other thing here is I don't have another machine up now other than the vista machine that has Sata. So, I'll have to wait until the xp machine is rebuilt. What if I put them into an external USB enclosure?

Would that work?

 

[Old Hippie]

What if I put them into an external USB enclosure?

Well, they'll look pretty, but still be formatted as dynamic and not able to be read by Vista.

Your lesson for today, stay away from dynamic disk partitioning.

Good Luck!

 

[gleclerc]

Old Hippie,

You know your stuff.....right on, for the hell of it, I gave it a try...still dynamic...Oh well, it's fine, I can wait until the xp machine is up again..

Gene

 

[Old Hippie]

Originally posted by: gleclerc
Old Hippie,

You know your stuff.....right on, for the hell of it, I gave it a try...still dynamic...Oh well, it's fine, I can wait until the xp machine is up again..

Gene

Gleclerc, even a blind squirrel finds a nut once in awhile! :laugh:

 

[gleclerc]

So...when I'm back up and running I should assign it a drive letter when I format it. What if that drive letter conflicts with one on a machine that I attach the drive to?

 

[Slowlearner]

I had mistakenly converted a basic disk to dynamic on a pc running w2000 and I was able to convert it back to basic using this:
http://faq.arstechnica.com/link.php?i=1806 and it worked fine, I havent tried this on Windows XP but the great minds at Redmond say:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/309044

 

[Old Hippie]

What if that drive letter conflicts with one on a machine that I attach the drive to?

XP Pro seems to do whatever it want's to.

It just assigns a drive letter according to what is connected at the time.

It's never been a problem even with frantic swapping.

I assume Vista is the same.

Good Luck!