Shoutbox

Today i installed Vista Ultimate and everything seems ok til when i run it for the first time, it takes a lot of time to initialize, then i was working prefectly, but when i restarted and tried to acces to my other hd it says that was corrupted
should i have to format it?
can i recover mi files from there?

thanks

If it says it's not accessible, then chances are the hard drive is corrupt and completely inaccessible no matter what!

However, it might just be Windows Vista, as it's a lot different to Windows XP (surprisingly), so boot windows xp and try to access the hard-drive using that.

But i already had vista, i only upgraded, and my two hd were working perfectly

your B:\ drive has a Vista hard drive icon, yet the letter B is reserved for floppy drives... for me anyway...

I've had no experience whatsoever of using Vista, but if you can, find a way to boot from Vista to XP, then see if you can get in that way.

It's most likely Vista saw the disk structure on that drive and presumed it was corrupt because the structure was ORIGINALLY meant for XP while Vista thought C:\ was the XP (the only time when it was actually right) disk, and the B:\ drive for Vista.

This is precisely the reason WHY I don't buy anything until ALL of the bugs are fixed.

It also makes known the fact that Vista isn't [QUITE] compatible with XP.

Well, the point you're making about vista and xp doesn't really make much sense, as they are both pieces of software, and vista doesn't need to be compatible with windows xp.

He means backwards compatible.

quote:

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Originally posted by Snaal Sevool Snr.
the letter B is reserved for floppy drives... for me anyway...

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Yes that is usually the case.

quote:

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Originally posted by Snaal Sevool Snr.
I've had no experience whatsoever of using Vista, but if you can, find a way to boot from Vista to XP, then see if you can get in that way.

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The only way you can do that is to reformat your harddrive, as you can't install an older operating system without formatting (usually)

quote:

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Originally posted by Snaal Sevool Snr.
It's most likely Vista saw the disk structure on that drive and presumed it was corrupt because the structure was ORIGINALLY meant for XP while Vista thought C:\ was the XP (the only time when it was actually right) disk, and the B:\ drive for Vista.

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XP and Vista both use the NTFS filesystem, so I'm not sure what you mean here... but, as he said, he only upgraded, so Vista would just have installed over the top of XP. It is possible to dual boot two windows installations (ie. have XP and Vista installed on different partitions), but I dont see the point.

For further information:
If you have two windows installations on different partitions on your harddrive eg.
Partition0 - XP
Partition1 - Vista

When you boot your computer into XP, the partitions will be read like this:
Partition0 - C:\
Partition1 - D:\ (or whatever drive letter you have associated with this partition within XP)

However when you boot your comptuer into Vista, the partitions will be read like this:
Partition0 - D:\ (or whatever drive letter you have associated with this partition within Vista)
Partition1 - C:\

The partition that you have the running Windows OS installed in is always read as the C:\ partition, and all others are usually assigned letters in sequence after that (D:\ E:\ F:\ etc.).

quote:

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Originally posted by Snaal Sevool Snr.
This is precisely the reason WHY I don't buy anything until ALL of the bugs are fixed.

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Good luck finding a Windows OS that doesn't contain ANY bugs. Even XP has bugs and Vista is still in BETA, and you can't buy it yet anyway it's a part of the Customer Preview Program (CPP) (or something along those lines) and is downloadable from the microsoft website (assuming you have signed up for the program). (There have only been two releases on the CPP: Beta 2 and RC1, so you are not officially a BETA tester if you're in the CP Program.)

quote:

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Originally posted by Snaal Sevool Snr.
It also makes known the fact that Vista isn't [QUITE] compatible with XP.

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Vista doesn't have to be compatible with XP, as it is the upgraded Operating system from XP. Though if you are talking in the way of backwards compatibility for applications and the like, then no it's not totally backwards compatible yet.

Well that was a marathon.

Can vista read FAT32 partitions? if not that might be the case.

Also you can try changeing the drive letter (its under Admin tools>>disk management on XP ) to something other than B (try E) incase B is still reserved for floppys.

I think it's highly unlikely that even Microsoft would do away with FAT32 supp... actually no it's nearly certain they didn't, most USB flash sticks use FAT/32.

Is B: an actual drive or another partition?

I've never seen a hard drive become corrupted in this way on its own (unlike bad sectors, which can happen for no reason except extensive use), I'd recommend trying out Knoppix or another program which should let you see if the filesystem structure is still intact.

If it isn't... there are data recovery programs out there but they're far from cheap.

FAT32 is gone from Vista just so you know