angryInch

As I said in my original post XP IS on a separate drive. (from original post: Luckily my XP partition is on a different drive, so I altered the BIOS so that the XP drive was the fist drive to be booted and managed to successfully boot into XP.) The MBR is intact and pointing to the correct partitions, the problem is the MFT on the 1st partition. I'll have a look at this tonight, however the problem is not that the drive letters are being assigned incorrectly, it is that they are not being assigned at all, and when I assign them manually through Disk Management they will not stay assigned. Looks like some good information in there, I'll read through it now. Yup, I like playing with matches alright, but to be honest I have a pretty good understanding of what I am doing (most of the time ). This all stemmed from me not paying attention during the Linux installation, I've given myself a good kick in the a** for that! I've just never heard of Windows blocking write access to a drive which it can mount and also see all partitions and data. Already done! I'm awaiting a 1Tb drive at the moment so that I can back up everything. I was buying this anyway to set up a RAID 1 array so I would always have a mirror of my data. Anyway, thanks for your help, I'll report back on any progress (or lack thereof!)

Its nothing to do with Acronis, that just happens be the program that I originally used to partition the drive. I can recevor the data as described in my original post, the problem is not reading from the drive its writing to it.

I'll give this a try tonight, but as the drive letters will not stay assigned to the drive (as described in my original post), thus not allowing windows to see the dirty bit at startup, this probably won't work.

Also even if its run from within windows it should ask if you want to run it on start-up. It does not even do this. Somehow windows is blocking access to this drive, presumably to protect the file system, however I can find no information on how windows does this or how to reverse it.

Hope somebody can help me with a strange problem I am having. At the moment the problem is that Windows XP (I have a dual boot and this is the only one I can access) mounts one of my hard drives as read only. I believe this is down to the fact that there seams to be a problem with the MFT on the Vista partition of this hard drive. I'll go through how I got to this situation! I used Acronis Disk Commander to create some free space on my hard drive so that I could install Fedora Core 8. However during the installation of Fedora disk druid was not able to use the hard space, though this was strange I just accepted it and booted back up to windows and used Disk Commander to create a 40Gb extfs partition (mounted as ‘/’) and a 4Gb Linux swap partition. When I again tried to install Linux (selecting the’/’ partition in disk druid) it warned me that there was a problem with the drive and it would have to erase all data. Stupidly I said Yes (it was late and night and I should have been paying more attention), and immediately realising the stupidity of what I had done I rebooted. Lo and behold my partitions were gone. Handily I had a version of Ultimate boot disk at hand, so using TestDisk I recovered the partition table, wrote the recovered table to the MBR and then rebuilt the corrupted BootSector on my Vista drive (the first and active partition on the drive I had formatted). However it still would not boot up (even though the MBR was fine, as it got to the screen offering me the choice of XP or Vista). I then tried to repair it with the Vista install disk, but that failed. Luckily my XP partition is on a different drive, so I altered the bois so that the XP drive was the fist drive to be booted and managed to successfully boot into XP. Now here is were I have a problem that I can’t seam to fix. XP seams to be mounting the problem drive (the one I recovered the partition table on) in read-only (write-protected) mode, and none of the NTFS partition are showing up in ‘My Computer’ I then went to My Computer->Manage->Disk Management and the problem drive and all its partitions are listed there (all as healthy) as the screen shot below shows. However, when I assign a drive letter to any of the drive’s, although it assigns it properly I still cannot see the drive in ‘My Computer’, however I can access the drives contents by right-clicking on them in ‘Disk Management’ and clicking open, I can also access them through Command Prompt. I think the reason that I cannot access them through ‘My Computer’ is because it is mounted read-only the assigned drive letters won’t ‘stick’. My next idea was to do a chkdsk, the result of which was: Great, so that’s the problem, then I ran a ‘chkdsk /F’, the result of which was Now, I know that chkdsk /F cannot run while the drive is mounted by windows, however if I reboot and use the Windows XP disk to boot to a repair command prompt I cannot access this drive as it has no drive letter assigned to it (is there a way to manually mount a drive from here?). I have tried assigning drive letters to the drive using Acronis Disk Commander, but as XP mount the drive read-only again the drive letters do not stick. Also I have rebuilt the BootSector and checked the MFT using TestDisk again, but the problem still remains. This problem drive also contains 3 other partition (primary) which contain a lot of important information and also contains my ‘Program Files’ directory (I install all my programs to this drive instead of the usual C:/Program Files), so I really want to get it usable again. Since I can see and access all the partitions and information using ‘Disk Management’ I know that all the data is OK, I just need windows to stop mounting it read only. I think this read-only problem is the reason that the Vista Start-up Repair failed as it probably mounted the drive read-only as well. Can anyone help me get this drive either mounted read/write in a repair console so that I can run chkdsk /F, or else mounted read/write in XP. I don’t mind losing my Vista partition (although as it seams to be structurally intact it should be fine to boot to still), but as I don’t have space to copy all the data on this drive to (it about 700Gb of data) I really need to make this disk read/write so I can use the data (epically my ‘Program Files’ directory). I had a good look around the web but nothing helped….so any help here would be seriously appreciated.