Vista - please help me

hello maybe some can help me please..
i have been using winxp 64bit for the
last 2 days . now today i booted into vista
home prem 64bit and some of my drives are missing.
dvd and 1 of my harddrives.i can see them when booting
up the system and i can boot to the missing drive that
has winxp 64bit installed on it but vista can't find
them. also i tryed going into the disk management but
it just sets there and will no longer list my drives.
also my web brower will not work .. it just loads the
page and then hangs there.if i try clicking on anything
the page just starts to fade white and nothing happens.
i have a copy of my Favorites on a flash drive and i can
open the browser with one of them and it works fine. then
if i close the browser and open it in the start menu again
it works. i'm using avast antivirus and windows Defender
and there both telling me the system is fine.
thanks scrooge...

Can you explain the procedure you went through to vhange from Win XP 64 bit to Vista 64 bit.

Was it an upgrade?

Or clean install

etc etc etc

If you are unable to view the DVD drives try to open registry by clicking on the start and in the start search tyope regedit press enter::
-Delete Upper and lower filter under registry location
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Class\{4D36E965-E325-11CE-BFC1- 08002BE10318}
-Uninstall the drivers for DVD Drives from device manager by click on the control panel ( classisc view ) device manager -> DVD ROM.

Good luck.

i'm sorry for the misunderstanding. i have vista on 1 drive
and winxp on the other drive and as it boots i hit f8 and select
the drive to boot to . i have been using this setup for about 6
months now and nothing like this happened before.

(btw) after i rebooted the system again i got a popup saying that
my activation is now deactivated do to a hardware change and then
all the drives came back.but now it takes about 5 mins to boot into
vista .the system just hangs on the black screen before the desktop.
also it says vista is still activated when i check control panel /
system.so i don't no what's going on now.i think it's time to reformate
the drive and start over.

Hi scrooge,

Before reinstalling Vista, I suggest that you have a look at the 2 Tutorials by Shawn to see if they can help you. It sounds as though the activation status on your system has become confused and needs resetting. That may be enough to bring your optical drive back on line, but if it doesn't then you haven't really lost anything if you were thinking of doing a reinstall anyway. Just make sure that you have a backup of any important data.
Dwarf

Activate Vista by Phone
Activation - Extend Trial Period