Vista - Phantom Drives in "Computer" window.

So I have a 100gb Seagate portable hard drive, which is split 50/50 between an HFS partition for leopard, and a NTFS partition for windows.

When I added the windows partition, it asked me what letter to give it, so to make it memorable, I gave it Z:/.

Now, after it has been plugged in a few times, I see in "Computer" that is listed many times, as "Local disk ('Letter')". I removed the drive letter setting completely, thinking that would help, but it didn't change anything, now the real listing just says G instead of Z. but the phantom drives are still there.
the REAL listing for the drive is the Seagate NTFS (G/) one. However all of the other ones work as well and show the contents of the drive.

Now, I have another portable hard drive that is 500GB, that is also split half and half the same way, and it never does this.

Any Ideas? is there any way to force vista to double check it's mounted drives to see if they all really exist?

The problem is trying to run multiple OSs on an external drive. Each time you load one OS the drive is redetected with a different drive letter being assigned.

This is a common problem with external drives when being plugged in then unplugged and later replugged back in especially if the drive connects by usb or firewire. Long term installations OSs should be seen on internal drives due to how fragile external setups can be.

I see how that could cause some issues, but typically Windows will not see a Mac partition (unless something like HFS Explorer is used), so shouldn't Vista just see the NTFS partition, which has no OS on it? (BTW, I only have one OS on the external drive, Vista is on my internal, OSX is on half of the external, and then the other half of the external is the empty NTFS partition)

I was thinking it could have something to do with the way that OS X formatted the drive first. I think I might have used a GUID partition table rather than an MBR table.

I think my other 500GB external drive uses MBR...

I have OSX installed on the 500 as well, on a 250GB partition, and then the additional 250GB NTFS partition. This drive uses MBR and has had no issues like this one has had.

The other difference between the two is the GUID one's EFI section shows up in windows, on the MBR one it doesn't show up.

I may just start over, and use MBR this time.

Either way, I find it odd that Vista has no way to detect if there actually is a drive at the end of each Letter association, or that it allows one partition to have multiple numbers. Then again I dont know if this is a Vista issue, or a Hardware setup issue, or a combination.

Anyways, thanks for your help, I will respond again once I try with MBR.

With Mac being closer in some ways to Linux the additional drives are similar to what you see when looking at the root which is seen as the filesystem. The swap is seen as another unidentified local disk which can easily be an extended logical drive inside another primary partition there.

Ah I see, that makes sense.

I assume the GUID vs MBR just controls how that setup gets dealt with by the computer. As I see it, GUID makes the computer see those as separate drives... or separate mount points. MBR keep everything contained in one mount point... how windows does it.

Anywho, without changing anything, I am having trouble booting OSX off of this disk, so I think it's somewhat going belly up anyways. Will still try to re set it up using MBR though.

thanks for the explanation.

Hey good luck with the next setup there. The MS mbr always seems to be the preferred anyways due to simplifying things a bit.

Try this:

1. Open "Control Panel"
2. Click "System and Maintenance"
3. Click "Administrative Tools"
4. Double-click "Computer Management" (You will need to respond to a UAC prompt)
5. Click on "Disk Management" in the left pane
6. Right-click on the relevant volume, then select "Change Drive Letter and Paths..."
7. "Remove" all extraneous drive letter assignments.