I've had a meltdown

OK, I had a major crash and had to do a clean install of Vista Home Premium. Not much is working right since the reinstall and most of it was before.
First things first, my hard drives. I have four, WD Raptor 74GB as my main, WD SATA 200GB, WD SATA 500GB, & WD PATA 80GB. Now, Windows sees all the drives but I cannot access the 500 or 80GB drives. When I go to Disk Management in the Control Panal both drives are marked as offline.

Here's a pic if I can post offsite images. Does anyone who to fix this? most of the stuff I need to fix the other problems are on the 500GB drive.

OK, here is a pic of the command prompt trying to get it back online

it's because the drives are dynamic . i had the same problem and got westen digital setup
disk and reformated them and it fixed it.hope you had a backup cause i was not able to use the drives untill i reset the disk back to ntfs. hope that helps you
mike

mikegis said:

it's because the drives are dynamic . i had the same problem and got westen digital setup
disk and reformated them and it fixed it.hope you had a backup cause i was not able to use the drives untill i reset the disk back to ntfs. hope that helps you
mike

Click to expand...

but it worked fine yesterday...

Well you can thank MS and Vista(probably) for that. I have no idea why you drives would turn dynamic, but the data is gone if you change it back to basic.

You may be able to get the data back with this software, there may be others: http://www.easeus.com/datarecoverywizard/dynamic-disks-recovery.htm

And then change from dynamic to basic: http://technet2.microsoft.com/windo...4c49-45c6-96cb-ec6d7686317b1033.mspx?mfr=true

I just reformatted from Vista to XP last night after dealing with nagging little issues for months. Like all their first releases of OS', this ain't ready for stable usage yet, IMO. Good luck.

tuskenraider said:

Well you can thank MS and Vista(probably) for that. I have no idea why you drives would turn dynamic, but the data is gone if you change it back to basic.

You may be able to get the data back with this software, there may be others: http://www.easeus.com/datarecoverywizard/dynamic-disks-recovery.htm

And then change from dynamic to basic: http://technet2.microsoft.com/windo...4c49-45c6-96cb-ec6d7686317b1033.mspx?mfr=true

I just reformatted from Vista to XP last night after dealing with nagging little issues for months. Like all their first releases of OS', this ain't ready for stable usage yet, IMO. Good luck.

Click to expand...

Ouch. Is there really no other way? I guess now it is settled, I will never run vista.

Vista did not cause this, him setting the disk to dynamic did this

If the OP did nothing but reinstall the OS and it configured the drives as dynamic, then it's the OS' fault. For Vista to tag the drives as dynamic for whatever reason is poor configuration on their part.

I did nothing but reinstall the OS. Three times now. I've found a little app called R Studio that will read the drive and recover your data.