I just put on Vista Ultimate (Build 5744) on a separate partition on the same
disk as XP Pro (SP2 w/all updates). The Vista install went fine, all but one
of my devices was found (USB floppy, no big deal), and everything seemed
golden. I booted back to XP and everything was still fine there too.

Then I come back to Vista and start looking around closer. I noticed in
Disk Management that all of my mounted shares (i.e. partitions with mount
points on a different drive; i.e C:\Media\Audio being a mount point for my
Audio partition, C:\Media\Video being a mount point for my Video partition,
and so on) had both a mount point *AND* a drive letter associated with them.
Thus, C:\Media\Audio had both C:\Media\Audio and something like L:\ mapped to
it. I wasn't sure why Vista felt the need to do that but checked and I
seemed to be able to access files from either mount. Nonetheless, I don't
like wasted drive letters and so set about removing the L:\ etc from all of
my file-system mounted partitions. All but one such partitions were
contained on a Dynamic Disk. The other such partition was a partition on the
same drive as Vista, a Basic Disk.

OK, so I do all of that and everything seems fine. I also go through and
turn off indexing on all the drives which, like XP, is Vista's default to
enable it. Also note that ALL of my physical drives other than the Vista/XP
boot drive are Dynamic Disks.

Next time I boot to *XP*, all of a sudden, XP no longer can access ANY of my
other drives. XP Disk Management sees them but they are all marked as
Offline. If I right-click and choose Reactive Disk, I get an error and am
told to look in the System Event log. I do and I've pasted the event log at
the end of this. Now I can see maybe Murphy's Law hit me with a drive
failure, but 7 simultaneous drive failures?? I don't think so!

If I boot back to Vista, all drives are readable still and I can access all
files from them, and all mount points are honored. Since I have all my
actual applications stored on one the Dynamic Drives, I figure, alright, I
have enough space on one of the other drives to copy all the data from all
partitions on that drive to the other drive. I'll just do that, reformat the
Apps drive as a Basic drive, then bring everything back over. Nice theory
but Vista's file copying is soooooooooooooooooo agonizingly slow. To copy a
30GB partition from one drive to another, with no other activity from me
going on, took about 8 hours.

Does ANYONE have any insight here?? I did open a Microsoft Beta Client
report but no one from Microsoft has gotten back to me yet.

Event log:
===============
- System
- Provider
[ Name] LDM
- EventID 2
[ Qualifiers] 49408
Level 2
Task 0
Keywords 0x80000000000000
- TimeCreated
[ SystemTime] 2006-11-06T08:06:14.000Z
EventRecordID 4
Channel D:\DMErrors.evt
Computer KINGDOM
Security
- EventData
INTERNAL Error - The disk group contains no valid configuration copies
C10000B6

- System
- Provider
[ Name] LDM
- EventID 1500
[ Qualifiers] 49408
Level 2
Task 0
Keywords 0x80000000000000
- TimeCreated
[ SystemTime] 2006-11-06T08:06:14.000Z
EventRecordID 3
Channel D:\DMErrors.evt
Computer KINGDOM
Security
- EventData
Disk group KINGDOM-Dg0: Errors in some configuration copies: Disk
Harddisk1, copy 1: Block 1: A format error was found in the configuration
copy Disk Harddisk2, copy 1: Block 1: A format error was found in the
configuration copy Disk Harddisk3, copy 1: Block 1: A format error was found
in the configuration copy Disk Harddisk4, copy 1: Block 1: A format error was
found in the configuration copy Disk Harddisk5, copy 1: Block 1: A format
error was found in the configuration copy Disk Harddisk6, copy 1: Block 1: A
format error was found in the configuration copy Disk Harddisk7, copy 1:
Block 1: A format error was found in the configuration copy

The solution is really simple (although not that optimal): in
Vista/Windows 7 you assign the drive letter back to the volume, then it
will automagically be available in XP and have that drive letter.

This has happened to me on an XP/Windows 7 RC dual boot installation.
And I've searched the internet for days to find a solution, without
success. I had not realized that removing the drive letter had caused me
the problems until I came by your post, so thank you and thank you again
(as my spanned volume is 650Mb in size and it would require a couple of
new disks and ages to back up).



--
SeventhUser