Recently I have taken Vista for a little test drive to get a first impression. I used an older 45 GB drive for this. I removed all partitioning and repartitioned it during the Vista installation. After having explored it for a couple of hours I now wanted to do something different with the drive so I made a backup of the installation and wanted to remove it but when I ran Partition Magic 8 while it was now connected to the secondary IDE port while booting from another drive attached to the primary IDE port, it reported several problems with the partition table on this drive that it offered to repair. I was surprised but let it do so since I only wanted to remove all partitions again anyway. After having made the alterations to the partition table PM8 still reported the drive as BAD and I couldn't do anything with it in PM. I have now used the Drive Fitness Test to erase the drive and undoubtedly I will now be able to use it again. While writing this it just finished with the 'Green Screen' telling me all is OK with the drive.

Does anyone know whether Vista does some new strange and unspeakable things to a drive that PM8 is unable to recognise and deal with? I haven't seen anything like this before.

I also wonder whether the Vista installation will work again if and when I restore it again without running any boot repair actions first.

WinXP did want to do a reboot after having recognised the 'new' drive with the Vista installation but that's common behaviour when a previously unknown drive is seen AFAIK. I let it do the reboot.

Any ideas?