Hi, Ken.
What DOES Disk Management say about your second HD?
I've been using Disk Management ever since it was introduced in Windows
2000. And I've dual-booted several varieties of Win2K/WinXP/Vista, sharing
data disks on several hard disk drives among them. Your problem should be
pretty easy to resolve - and should not involve formatting that drive.
First, tell us everything that DM says about that HDD. Is it "Disk 1"? Is
it all a single primary partition? Is it formatted NTFS? What does it say
in the "Type" column? Is it "Basic"? What does it say in the "Status"
column? There may be several "Statuses" listed; please tell us all of them.
How did you install Vista? Was this a new computer, with OEM Vista
pre-installed, into which you moved your old data drive? Or did you swap
out the first hard drive in your existing computer? Were the old OS drives
IDE, SATA, or some other interface?
In Disk Management, click Help | Help Topics. This Help file is organized
from many, so it takes a little getting used to, but it is chock full of
information! Click the Search tab, then type in "foreign" and click List
Topics. Highlight the first topic, "Troubleshooting Disk Management", and
press Enter to see a page asking, "What problem are you having?" See if
something on this page provides some clues. For example, "The Foreign
status occurs when you move a dynamic disk to the local computer from
another computer running Windows 2000, Windows XP Professional, ..."
RC
--
R. C. White, CPA
San Marcos, TX
rc@grandecom.net
Microsoft Windows MVP
(Running Windows Live Mail beta in Vista Ultimate x64)
"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!