Hi, Rick
In general, it is not a good idea to have a CD/DVD drive be a master and
hard drive be a slave on an IDE cable. I tried that once and my system
slowed to a crawl. Making the hard drive the master fixed it.

Before I talk about your problem, we need to define some terms. You have
talked about having a SATA drive and an IDE drive. These are physical
drives, which can be partitioned. Each partition that is not hidden will be
assigned a "drive letter", like C: or D: during bootup. It is important to
note that the drive letter refers to a partition on a physical drive, not to
the physical drive itself. You might think that a drive with only one
partition has not been partitioned; that would be wrong. It must be
partitioned, which sets up the partition table, before the drive is
formatted -- otherwise the format program wouldn't know what part of the
physical drive to format.

You have stated that the IDE drive has two partitions. When you were using
it, they probably were assigned the drive letters C: and D: during the
bootup process. You probably had WXP installed on C: drive. You may have
installed some programs on drive D: WXP and many programs store the paths
of programs and .DLLs they need in the registry, including the drive letter.
On bootup, your SATA drive is now being assigned the letter C:. WXP is
going to have major problems trying to find its stuff on C:.

Hopefully your IDE drive was not messed up by the Vista installation. I
would remove the SATA drive and verify whether your WXP system is still
usable. Report back here, and maybe we can guide you to a dual boot setup
you can live with.

-Paul Randall

"Rick" <rickk@bright.net> wrote in message
news:eAAgbVa4HHA.5212@TK2MSFTNGP04.phx.gbl...
> Hi again
>
> Ok to clarify what's happening is
>
> XP and the partioned drive (ide)was my original drive on this system. I
> added a second drive( sata), made it my primary c drive and loaded Vista
> on it. I moved the old drive and it now appears as a slave with the DVD
> burner as primary in the ide cable.
>
> Vista finds the drive and identifies it as a ntfs with mbr drive. It shows
> the two partitions D and E. That is correct. I have full permissions
> control of the drive.
>
> It allows me to check the properties on the E drive partition ( which I
> know is a empty partition.
>
> However on the d drive partition ( were XP is installed) it correctly
> shows the disk usage, but will not let me check the properties of that
> partition. If I attempt to explore it Vista reports the drive is blank.
>
> I don't care as much if Vista sees the files on the second drive. I just
> want to be able to boot to one system or the other. My plan was as
> suggested is to made the E drive a share drive for both systems.
>
> Thanks for your help and I hope this clarifies things some what.
>
> "Rick" <rickk@bright.net> wrote in message
> news:%23dkk3iV4HHA.4712@TK2MSFTNGP04.phx.gbl...
>> Hi
>>
>> I did a fresh install of Vista Ultimate on a new Sata drive. My old drive
>> is now a slave drive on the other controller. The old drive has a working
>> copy of XP Home on it. It was my original drive for this system.
>>
>> The problem is Vista cant read any files from the old drive. Vista found
>> the drive and partitions on that drive and did assign drive letters.
>>
>> What do I need to do to make Vista recognize Windows XP and be able to
>> boot to either system?
>>
>> I wasn't sure if it was a Vista or XP problem so I posted to both groups.
>> My apologizes if that was inappropriate.
>>
>> Thanks in advance
>> Rick
>>
>
>