This looks bad. . . . OS EXPERTS and GENIUSES REQUESTED

I have a Maxtor Diamond Max 250 gig with two partitions, large and small. Large contains Windows XP

I have a Western Digital 250 Gig with two partitions, large and small, Large contains Vista X64 business

I have a 500 gig Data only RAID 1 mirror drive.

I went to perform a Norton Ghost backup of the Maxtor XP partion, with the destination of the WDC small partition, and ghost got disk errors somewhere,
and so i have done chkdsk, crap cleaning and defragmentation to the Maxtor XP partition. . . when I tried a third ghost sesson, i got a BSOD, and now XP sees the WDC Vista partion as RAW.

However, if I flip over to WDC Vista x64 partition and use that as the operating system, everything appears normal and runs normal

so what can i do to have XP see the WDC Vista partition as NOT RAW! (obviously, I can't format or reformat it from XP.) or do i just live with XP missing the Vista partion?

got me beat with this one

thanks

Wile E Coyote

well, i unplugged the Vista drive, and booted into XP and then shut down, plugged the Vista drive back in and rebooted, and magically XP could see the drive contents. . .

whatever. . .

and i have backup images of both drives now. . .

sportsguy

"or do i just live with XP missing the Vista partion"

That may not be such a bad thing. Have a read of this page
No restore points are available when you use Windows Vista or Windows Server 2008 in a dual-boot configuration together with an earlier Windows operating system
It explains how every time you boot XP in a Vista and XP dual booting setup, XP ruins the contents of the System Volume Information on Vista's partition. It deletes Vista's restore points, and also the Complete System Backups (a feature available in Ultimate and Business but not the Home editions). The workaround recommended by Microsoft is to hide the Vista partition from XP, using a registry edit in XP. You can still share documents between the two OSs by saving them into any partition except Vista's.

Alternatively, if you want to be able to read and write files in Vista's partition while in XP, you might as well turn off the system restore feature in Vista (so it doesn't save any restore points) which will liberate some disk space.

If you are saving images regularly with Ghost, system restore is not so necessary.
Also using Ghost or Acronis TrueImage or Seagate DiskWizard to save disk images is much better than using Ultimate's 'complete system backup' feature.

yea, my XP system restore does not impact the Vista drive, i disabled that awhile ago, thanks to this wonderful web site.

I don't re-image the disks very often, in fact, its been 9 months since my last image.
The reason is that I don't add or change much software. However, this time, I have added new software, and so I wanted a good image to restore with, no junk files, no fragmentation, latest updates on a different hard drive completely.

especially with disks which are starting to approach 3 years old, etc.

so far the dual boot, dual drive system works very well, except that the idiots at MS should have made Office 2007 64 bit, which would have integrated well with Vista X64, and really pushed the entire 64 bit systems as the main stream worth upgrades.

sportsguy

I just looked again, and XP does not recognize the drive partition again. . .. after rebooting this morning. . . something funky is going on. . .

anyone with suggestions why XP won't read a partition at startup ?

thanks

Sportsguy

Something to try:
Does it only misbehave when you have a USB device attached which takes a drive letter?
Can you assign the Vista partition a new drive letter in XP's Disk Management?
While booted into XP, run diskmgmt.msc, right-click the raw partition > Change drive letter and paths. Give it a high unused letter such as M:
That will not affect its letter while Vista is booted (where it will still be lettered C) because the info about its assigned drive letter is not written on the partition, it's written in XP's registry.

ah, didn't think about that now that i have a USB drive attached. . .

let me try

thanks

sportsguy

no usb attachments. . . still happens. . . Vista partition is unreadable to XP though the second partition on the same disk is readable

i don't think its the cable, but could be. .

or could be a controller on the MB. . . .

anyone else with suggestions?

thanks

Sportsguy