[Solved] New Vista machine won't recognize old XP hard drive

Hi all,

The motherboard on my old XP machine died a month ago. I got a new Dell running Vista. Today I tried to put the old hard drive in my new machine so I can move my documents, pictures, and music to the new computer but I couldn't get it to work.

The old hard drive is a Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 160GB SATA. I plugged it in the new machine and turned on the computer. I checked the BIOS and it recognized the hard drive. I booted into Vista and Vista did a little new hardware/device detected thing and said the device was ready to use after restart. I restarted the computer and checked My Computer. No luck--the old hard drive didn't show up. I checked Device Manager; it listed both hard drives and they were "working properly."

I did a little Googling. That led me to Disk Management. Again, the old hard drive showed up there. Although, unlike the hard drive that came with the new computer, it was not assigned a drive letter. When I right-click on the partitions on the old hard drive, the only thing that wasn't grayed out was "Delete Volume."

Any ideas?

Thank you in advance for your help!

Thanks for the pointer, r_manic! Norton something-or-other is installed on the new machine. (It is actually my girlfriend's parents' computer; I thought it would be easier to describe the problem in first-person.) I will try to play around with Norton when I am at their house tomorrow. I will keep you updated!

Thanks again!!

So it indeed was Norton GoBack that was causing all the trouble. I booted up the computer from the old hard drive and disabled GoBack when the GoBack splash screen came up. I then rebooted into Vista and everything worked the way they should!

Thanks again, r_manic!