My Hard Drive Died!

Round One Testing Vista for Data Recoveries:

I am testing Vista with some of my recoveries and I have found some major problems mounting and using big hard drives in Vista.

For example, I have a 750gig NTFS formatted drive with several thousand small files on it. XP sees it just fine and no problems. However when plugged in Vista it first pauses for a long time and looks like it is trying to count files for that pretty display for free space, however it fails and errors out and shows the hard drive as RAW. It is not raw, and many XP machines have zero problems with it at all. I have also tested in several other configurations and Vista continues to have a problem with the drive.

Second example, I have a 1.5 Terabyte drive with several thousand files formatted as Fat32. Vista does eventually find the drive and mount it, slowly, then displays the count of files correctly and the size. I highlighted and deleted 950 gigs and Vista goes chugging away for 4 days. Yes 4 days to delete 10 folders with 950 gigs. Something I do in XP very quickly.

Third problem, when you open a folder and copy files, even with advanced on, it never tells you what files are being copied. If you are copying three folders and then you decided to cancel one, you only see Source and Destination locations of the drives but no info about folder and files being copied. It is like being blind. Who would not have included the copy info?

I am dealing with a few other problems but there is obviously some file handling problems and drive mounting problems.

If anyone else is having problems with Vista and mounting drives please email me! scott@forensicstrategy.com