Cant partition a WD hard drive.

Recently installed Vista Ultimate x64. Immediately updated with Windows update including SP1. Went to partition a WD 3200AAKS which was to be used for storage and backups. Drive is shown in Bios, Device manager, and Disk manager and drivers installed. Connected by Sata to the board. Started partitoning by shrinking the volume, and then choosing New Simple volume in the unalloacted space. It hangs at this point but a new "Other Device" is shown in device manager. Checked and it is identified as generic Volume, so I attempted to install drivers with no success. Went through all the steps including the Microsoft fix which of course failed for this. Also used browse to point to inf and driverstore. Nothing worked. Initially got the message "The system cant find the file specified" and followed all the driver install procedure from there. Almost sounds like a problem similar to the USB problems. Any suggestions. After all this I have to delete both to get the entire drive back.

if you reinstall vista partion the disk before it starts installing
when you see the screen to select the drive you want to install to click advanced and partition the disk there

ps i am assuming you will have to reinstall because you say you have to delete both partitions to get the drive back

To clarify a little. I initially shrunk the hard drive in two, went to the unallocated space and right clicked to make a new volume there. It correctly assigned a Drive letter, showed the size and whether I checked quick format or not, it hung up when I clicked OK. I did look around and strangely there was a new "Other Device" with Generic Volume appearing in device manager.

I had to close and reopen disk manager and there was no information other than size on the New Volume. I could delete that volume. I then went to the other partition and tried to extend it. It would show the size but the Next button was grayed out. To restore the drive I had to temporarily copy that part to another drive and delete it and the entire drive came back.

Need a little bit more info. When you installed the drive, did you format it? If so, what did you use to format the drive? Vista or the included disk (WD Lifeguard?)? FAT32 or NTFS? After you formatted, did you store any data on the drive before the shrink? Since you state that is will be used for data and backups (I'm assuming your main Vista partition is on another drive), was it formatted as a logical partition or a primary? Is this a SATA 3Mb/sec drive (I would assume it is)? Does your mobo support SATA 3Mb/sec drives (what is your mobo)? Sorry for all the questions, they are relevant.

HexManiac:

Two internal sata Drives: Operating system on C: and this drive is D:
Formatted the the Drive with the Vista Disk Manager - NTFS - long format not quick- Primary Partition
Yes data had been stored on the drive
Drive Specs:
Model Brand Western Digital Series Caviar SE16 Model WD3200AAKS Performance Interface SATA 3.0Gb/s Capacity 320GB RPM 7200 RPM Cache 16MB Average Seek Time 8.9ms Average Write Time 10.9ms Average Latency 4.2ms

Board:
GIGABYTE GA-P35-DS3L

Yes it supports Sata 3Gb/s

Outstanding. You are on the ball. Shrink the volume as you did before. All free space should be to the right of the altered partition (volume and partition are interchangeable here). After the shrink succeeds, were you able to see the volume and access it inside of Vista? Check this before you try to create a new partition. Reboot and see if you can still see it and access it.

HexManiac:

Copied data on the drive to a safe location. Also ran a chkdsk on the drive with no errors found.

Shrunk(half D: and half unallocated) the volume as before. Still can access the drive.
Rebooted and still can access the drive.

Looks good so far. Try this in safe mode first. Go ahead and right click on the unallocated space and create your new volume. Assign a drive letter, format it as NTFS with the default allocation unit size and enter your new volume name. Quick format it if you want.

If this does not work and gives you the same problem as before, restart the process but create the new partition with the WD tools. Although it seems that you have done everything correctly and there seems to be no hardware issues, sometimes the tools provided by Vista just don't get it done due to unseen software or driver conflicts. Third party tools are usually more robust. They check for conflicts and handle them a bit better.