Hard Drive is read only....help

Hope somebody can help me with a strange problem I am having
At the moment the problem is that Windows XP (I have a dual boot an
this is the only one I can access) mounts one of my hard drives as rea
only. I believe this is down to the fact that there seams to be
problem with the MFT on the Vista partition of this hard drive
I'll go through how I got to this situation

I used Acronis Disk Commander to create some free space on my har
drive so that I could install Fedora Core 8. However during th
installation of Fedora disk druid was not able to use the hard space
though this was strange I just accepted it and booted back up to window
and used Disk Commander to create a 40Gb extfs partition (mounted a
‘/’) and a 4Gb Linux swap partition. When I again tried to install Linu
(selecting the’/’ partition in disk druid) it warned me that there was
problem with the drive and it would have to erase all data. Stupidly
said Yes (it was late and night and I should have been paying mor
attention), and immediately realising the stupidity of what I had done
rebooted. Lo and behold my partitions were gone.

Handily I had a version of Ultimate boot disk at hand, so usin
TestDisk I recovered the partition table, wrote the recovered table t
the MBR and then rebuilt the corrupted BootSector on my Vista drive (th
first and active partition on the drive I had formatted). However i
still would not boot up (even though the MBR was fine, as it got to th
screen offering me the choice of XP or Vista). I then tried to repair i
with the Vista install disk, but that failed

Luckily my XP partition is on a different drive, so I altered the boi
so that the XP drive was the fist drive to be booted and managed t
successfully boot into XP. Now here is were I have a problem that
can’t seam to fix

XP seams to be mounting the problem drive (the one I recovered th
partition table on) in read-only (write-protected) mode, and none of th
NTFS partition are showing up in ‘My Computer’ I then went to M
Computer->Manage->Disk Management and the problem drive and all it
partitions are listed there (all as healthy) as the screen shot belo
shows

However, when I assign a drive letter to any of the drive’s, althoug
it assigns it properly I still cannot see the drive in ‘My Computer’
however I can access the drives contents by right-clicking on them i
‘Disk Management’ and clicking open, I can also access them throug
Command Prompt. I think the reason that I cannot access them through ‘M
Computer’ is because it is mounted read-only the assigned drive letter
won’t ‘stick’

My next idea was to do a chkdsk, the result of which was
> I:\>chkds
> The type of the file system is NTFS
> Volume label is Windows Vista
>
> WARNING! F parameter not specified
> Running CHKDSK in read-only mode
>
> CHKDSK is verifying files (stage 1 of 3)..
> File verification completed
> CHKDSK is verifying indexes (stage 2 of 3)..
> Index verification completed
> CHKDSK is verifying security descriptors (stage 3 of 3)..
> Security descriptor verification completed
> CHKDSK is verifying Usn Journal..
> Usn Journal verification completed
> Correcting errors in the uppercase file
> CHKDSK discovered free space marked as allocated in th
> master file table (MFT) bitmap
> Correcting errors in the Volume Bitmap
> Windows found problems with the file system
> Run CHKDSK with the /F (fix) option to correct these
>
> 31138615 KB total disk space
> 29424556 KB in 137010 files
> 67488 KB in 20224 indexes
> 0 KB in bad sectors
> 265343 KB in use by the system
> 65536 KB occupied by the log file
> 1381228 KB available on disk
>
> 4096 bytes in each allocation unit
> 7784653 total allocation units on disk
> 345307 allocation units available on disk.Great, so that’s the problem, then I ran a ‘chkdsk /F’, the result o
which wa
> I:\>chkdsk /
> The type of the file system is NTFS
> Cannot lock current drive
> Windows cannot run disk checking on this volume because it is writ
> protected.Now, I know that chkdsk /F cannot run while the drive is mounted b
windows, however if I reboot and use the Windows XP disk to boot to a
repair command prompt I cannot access this drive as it has no drive
letter assigned to it (is there a way to manually mount a drive from
here?).

I have tried assigning drive letters to the drive using Acronis Disk
Commander, but as XP mount the drive read-only again the drive letters
do not stick. Also I have rebuilt the BootSector and checked the MFT
using TestDisk again, but the problem still remains.

This problem drive also contains 3 other partition (primary) which
contain a lot of important information and also contains my ‘Program
Files’ directory (I install all my programs to this drive instead of the
usual C:/Program Files), so I really want to get it usable again. Since
I can see and access all the partitions and information using ‘Disk
Management’ I know that all the data is OK, I just need windows to stop
mounting it read only. I think this read-only problem is the reason that
the Vista Start-up Repair failed as it probably mounted the drive
read-only as well.

Can anyone help me get this drive either mounted read/write in a repair
console so that I can run chkdsk /F, or else mounted read/write in XP. I
don’t mind losing my Vista partition (although as it seams to be
structurally intact it should be fine to boot to still), but as I don’t
have space to copy all the data on this drive to (it about 700Gb of
data) I really need to make this disk read/write so I can use the data
(epically my ‘Program Files’ directory).

I had a good look around the web but nothing helped….so any help here
would be seriously appreciated.


+-------------------------------------------------------------------+
|Filename: problem.jpg |
|Download: http://www.vistax64.com/attachment.p...achmentid=6794 |
+-------------------------------------------------------------------+

--
angryInch