Hi all computer experts (again!)

Recently decided to ditch Vista due to many issues i've had with networking it. But that's another story...
The problem I now face having ditched Vista is that i cannot access my external usb raid hard drive as XP says it's not formatted. I can see it in my computer but not the size etc. And when I try to access it, it says it's not formatted and do I want to format.... NO! As it contains about 800gb of my aerial photos, formatting is not an option! All I want to do is make XP recognise it and be able to access the photos. All my single external drives work with both XP and Vista.
I know I can re-install Vista and it will work but i really want to avoid this if possible and would like it to work with XP.
I've Googled the problem to no avail so thought i'd ask the knowledge base on here who never let us down...
(Tried tweakUI by the way and can 'see' the drives but not access the files.)

Just a guess but did it come with a disk / driver for the RAID functionality? Go to the manufacturer's site and see if there are any downloads. As it stands the XP system may not be "seeing" the drive the same way i.e. as a RAID volume.

No it's done internally, you just set jumpers for the type of raid required..

I believe vista uses a slightly different version of ntfs file system so xp will not see it.

How about getting a free copy of virtual pc Linky and installing vista on to that and then you are able to copy accross on to the host machine (xp)

Bit of a mess around but would work without risking your data.

Cheers

Rich

Bit of a puzzle I am pretty sure it is a driver issue know from experience RAID arrays can be tricky when major changes are made to systems.

Runing Vista in a virtual PC is one way out (Sun VirtualBox is far and away the best and it is free for personal use) but because Vista is very greedy on system resources you will need oodles of memory to run Vista in a virtual PC.

So that leaves either upgrading Windows 7 or booting from Linux CD and archiving the data to another disk or DVD.

We switched away from USB hard drives for archives and backups because we found them a bit unreliable, we now use only NAS drives which can be read by any operating system and have a uSB socket if required.

[Edited on 16/3/10 by britishtrident]