I have a dual boot setup configured over two hard drives on my pc. XP on C: and Vista on H:. I also have a 3rd hard drive, D: which has no OS installed on it. The other day my pc froze up in XP and I had to restart. The startup/welcome screen for XP just went on and on for several minutes until I lost my patience and rebooted again. Now I tried starting Vista instead, but got a message saying i needed to type in my product key. I t's been 30 days since the vista install and my product key hasn't arrived (still in the mail). After a few attempts I finally got XP fired up but now the Vista HD (H:) is unavailable, and it asks if I want it to be formatted. If I try to access shortcuts to folders on H: I get the network access denied popup. It shows up in My Computer but won't open. In partition magic 8 it has a yellow frame around it and it says "BAD"... So I guess my question is; will this problem with the slow/hanging XP bootup and missing partition go away once I enter my Vista prodct key? Is there any way to access the partition in the meantime, like a hard drive recovery program maybe? I have a ton of stuff I really don't wanna loose on it. Thanks!

Why is it you don't have a product key which comes with Vista when you purchase it? Vista should be available for you to use once you enter the legal product key and activate it. It needs to be for the same version that you have installed. I would advise against using any tools to recover anything before you activate. You may well finish up losing everything.

..and my product key hasn't arrived (still in the mail). From Whom? i_Xp/VistaUser

I downloaded it, no crack or anything, to try it. Then I bought a full version on eBay which came too late for the 30 day thing.

You already know the problem. Not only is xp saying there is an issue but PM says so. You could get ultimate boot cd and try ranish to see more about the partition. Or just ranish alone. Ranish might be able to fix it. (might if you know what is going on) Be sure to NOT use xp to view contents. Use a live cd that doesn't try to write to disk. Guess you could see if a live cd could read it. Without a proper partition you'd have to use more advanced tools to try to recover data. See backtrack and maybe some other forensic live cd's for their tools. I read it wrong and answer it wrong too. So get off my case you peanut.