To whom can help, I recently purchased a new desktop computer with Vista Ultimate 64Bit OEM. It came with Vista installed on a SATA drive and I have about 3 older IDE drives of varying sizes that I need to pull data off of. I power down my computer, connect each drive individually and get the same result each time. Vista comes up, recogizes the ide drive, it shows up in computer management under Storage but I can't do anything with the drive and Vista does not assign a drive letter to it. I do notice that the drive shows up with a primary partition and not extended. I need to get the data off of these 3 drives but can't seem to get vista to let me. Please help. I did notice an option to virtualize the partition but it always says there isn't enough space to do it. Thanks, Michael

Can you assign a drive letter to the IDE drive? "Best Practices", Event viewer, host file, perfmon, antivirus, anti-spyware, Live CD's, backups, are in my top 10

When I go into Computer Management, Storage, Disk Management, the only drives I can change drive assignments to are the Sata ones, any ide that is there all options are grayed out except for delete volume.

I guess you could retry that. Open computer management as admin. Shift and right click pull down menu.?? Might try another route, consider a live linux cd like knoppix. I assume this data is microsoft, could it be from drives that used a hard drive application that was needed for older bios's? I forget the names but in win98 about they had drive programs to bypass bios limits. Overlay or something like that it was called. "Best Practices", Event viewer, host file, perfmon, antivirus, anti-spyware, Live CD's, backups, are in my top 10