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 and

this is the only one I can access) mounts one of my hard drives as read

only. I believe this is down to the fact that there seams to be a

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 hard

drive so that I could install Fedora Core 8. However during the

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 windows

and used Disk Commander to create a 40Gb extfs partition (mounted as

‘/’) and a 4Gb Linux swap partition. When I again tried to install Linux

(selecting the’/’ partition in disk druid) it warned me that there was a

problem with the drive and it would have to erase all data. Stupidly I

said Yes (it was late and night and I should have been paying more

attention), and immediately realising the stupidity of what I had done I

rebooted. Lo and behold my partitions were gone.

Handily I had a version of Ultimate boot disk at hand, so using

TestDisk I recovered the partition table, wrote the recovered table to

the MBR and then rebuilt the corrupted BootSector on my Vista drive (the

first and active partition on the drive I had formatted). However it

still would not boot up (even though the MBR was fine, as it got to the

screen offering me the choice of XP or Vista). I then tried to repair it

with the Vista install disk, but that failed.

Luckily my XP partition is on a different drive, so I altered the bois

so that the XP drive was the fist drive to be booted and managed to

successfully boot into XP. Now here is were I have a problem that I

can’t seam to fix.

XP seams to be mounting the problem drive (the one I recovered the

partition table on) in read-only (write-protected) mode, and none of the

NTFS partition are showing up in ‘My Computer’ I then went to My

Computer->Manage->Disk Management and the problem drive and all its

partitions are listed there (all as healthy) as the screen shot below

shows.

However, when I assign a drive letter to any of the drive’s, although

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 in

‘Disk Management’ and clicking open, I can also access them through

Command Prompt. I think the reason that I cannot access them through ‘My

Computer’ is because it is mounted read-only the assigned drive letters

won’t ‘stick’.

My next idea was to do a chkdsk, the result of which was:

> I:\>chkdsk

> 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 the

> 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 of

which was

> I:\>chkdsk /F

> The type of the file system is NTFS.

> Cannot lock current drive.

> Windows cannot run disk checking on this volume because it is write

> protected.Now, I know that chkdsk /F cannot run while the drive is mounted by

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.

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angryInch