Gary G. Little

Well ... you ain't gonna like it, but to use it, you will have to assign it
a drive letter and that basically means creating a new volume which means
formatting the drive. If you can, boot to the 80GB drive and save everything
on B, then go back to the Vista boot drive and restore it. If you have
ShadowProtect Desktop, or willing to try the trial version at
storagecraft.com, you can image b, boot to Vista and install ShadowProtect,
then resotre b after creating the volume.

You MIGHT try booting to the XP repair console and copying the files on b to
a, though I suspect Vista is going to block that. Vista has a repair console
also that could be worth trying. Most anything you do is going to require
copious amounts of storage space, so it most likely is time to break out, or
invest in, a USB HDD.

--
The personal opinion of
Gary G. Little


"Ken" <Ken@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:EF6731A7-DDF5-4736-80FA-172266606A7E@microsoft.com...
> Old System:
>
> a. 80 GB - Win XP SP2
> b. 160 GB (IDE) - Data files
>
> New System:
>
> a. 160 GB - Vista Home Premium
> b. 160 GB (IDE) - Data files
>
> After swapping the a. drives and putting Vista on the new one, Vista sees
> the b. drive in disk managment but can't bring it online or assign a drive
> letter to make is usable.
>
> What would causethis and how can it be fixed? The 160 (b.) drive has 100
> GB
> of data on it and can't be reformatted.
>
> Help!
>
>
>
>