I have installed Vista in a second partition on my primary drive with XP on the first one. The installation went without problems but Vista does not allow me to access a second hard drive that I have installed. There are no problems with XP. If I disconnect and then reconnect the drive Vista installs a driver for it and it is visible in device manager but not in "Computer". The drive concerned is a Seagate Barracude 160 gig.Any ideas?

have you gone into disk management in admin tools in control panel, and see whats going on with the drive there?

yes, it tells me that the disk is there, but the area displaying it is blank.It is labelled Disk 1, Dynamic and Off line. I assume there is something I have to do to make it on line.

If it's a new disk, have you partitioned and formatted it in Disk Management?

I've reread your post and realised that it's not a new disk, so forget the above.

How are you disconnecting and reconnecting the drive if it's the very one Vista is running from? What do you mean by "disconnecting" the drive?

"Enough, enough bowing down to disillusion!
Hats off & applause to rogues & evolution!
The ripple effect is too good not to mention.
If you’re not affected, you’re not paying attention!"

It's not the one Vista is running from. I have my primary drive partitioned. This is a secondary drive running as a slave on the primary cable.

OHHHHHHH!

Let me get this straight.

You have two hard drives. XP and Vista are on one, and you have an additional hard drive that can't be accessed by Vista, but can by XP, correct?

And I think I know what your issue is...

"Enough, enough bowing down to disillusion!
Hats off & applause to rogues & evolution!
The ripple effect is too good not to mention.
If you’re not affected, you’re not paying attention!"

That's Correct.

The issue is you made the other drive a dynamic disk in XP. If it were a basic disk, you'd be fine.

Was the disk used in XP as a spanning volume, or mount point...?

"Enough, enough bowing down to disillusion!
Hats off & applause to rogues & evolution!
The ripple effect is too good not to mention.
If you’re not affected, you’re not paying attention!"

Unfortunately I don't understand what those terms mean. I put the disk in and did what I had to do to get it to work.

Check and see in XP if the disk is listed in fact as a dynamic disk.

"Enough, enough bowing down to disillusion!
Hats off & applause to rogues & evolution!
The ripple effect is too good not to mention.
If you’re not affected, you’re not paying attention!"

yes it is listed as dynamic

http://technet2.microsoft.com/windo...

Please note you will lose the data on the drive doing this procedure, so make sure you back it up first!

"Enough, enough bowing down to disillusion!
Hats off & applause to rogues & evolution!
The ripple effect is too good not to mention.
If you’re not affected, you’re not paying attention!"

Thanks for the warning. I will back it up but this may take a little time. If you could tell me what to do I will proceed and then let you know the results.

Cancel the previous. I just checked the link you gave me and now understand. Thanks very much for all your help.

Let us know how it turns out.

"Enough, enough bowing down to disillusion!
Hats off & applause to rogues & evolution!
The ripple effect is too good not to mention.
If you’re not affected, you’re not paying attention!"

Success! Many thanks from Tasmania for all your help.

Good deal!

"Enough, enough bowing down to disillusion!
Hats off & applause to rogues & evolution!
The ripple effect is too good not to mention.
If you’re not affected, you’re not paying attention!"

You could have Converted the dynamic disk back to a basic disk without data loss

http://faq.arstechnica.com/link.php...

AMD Athlon 64 X2 4400+ OC 2.7ghz
4GB Dual Channel DDR 3200
Nvidia 7900GT
SATA II 2x 300gig 7200rpm 16mb cache RAID-0+1
Gigabyte Nforce 4 SLI

He should have backed up his data anyway. Good chance something could have gone awry doing that, and given his inexperience with stuff like this, I didn't think that was worthwhile.

"Enough, enough bowing down to disillusion!
Hats off & applause to rogues & evolution!
The ripple effect is too good not to mention.
If you’re not affected, you’re not paying attention!"