I've recently installed Vista RC1 on my computer. I had some problems getting Vista to install, apparently it didn't like the fact that I had 1 SATA and 1 IDE drive. I eventually had to turn of the IDE controller from the BIOS setup, and install Vista in a free partition on the SATA drive, where it happily resides along my running XP(32). After turning the IDE back on, whenever i attempt to access the IDE drive I get an "Access Denied" error. I don't want to "take ownership" of all the files, since that would prevent XP from reading them. Does anyone know of a way thatn I can share the data between both OS's?

I'm having the same issue but both of my drives are SATA. I installed Vista RC1 Build 5728 onto a 750gb disk and it was the only one that was attached at the time. Now that the OS is installed and working, I plugged in another 250gb drive..... i can access some of the files but a directory called "MEDIA" is denied and I "can not take ownership of it even as administrator"

All the tabs in the advanced security section say the same thing.... WTF! This makes no sense....... other directories are fine its just this one...... I've tried taking owership of the whole drive but it also says access denied.... this is most annoying! I hope that this is just a bug and not some "new feature" BS>...

I have 2 IDe and 2 SATA drives on my system, and I had no issues installing Vista in a dual-boot config. I also have not seen any "access denied" errors such as those you are referring to. Perhaps something in the file/folder permissions under x32 is interfering with access under Vista.

I am also hoping this is just a bug because I had considerable problems installing either flavour of Vista, I did eventually but I couldn't get either to install as a dual\multi boot on a second primary partition they had to have the first partition on the hard drive, even when one version of Vista was already installed, I gave up eventually and re-arranged things which took an age but I have now got XP64\32 on one drive, Vista X64 one another and the post RC1 X86 on a third, all works fine thanks to the (F8) boot menu on the Asus board I just boot whichever I want to fiddle with, at least none interfere with each other but it's not ideal.

Well, I'm not sure it IS exactly a Vista problem. Though from my eperience if you plug in a hard drive to an existing windows machine, there should be no permission problems. Since taking over 200GB of data every time I switch OS's isn't logical, I'm sure there should be a way for 2 Windows OS's to coexist on a machine and share drives. Must be something in the security..I'll try investigating it more over the weekend myself.
About the installation problems..it seems that for now Vista does have some problem with mixed IDE/SATA, or just with my nForce4 chipset. Though to my surprise it recognized most of my hardware instantly..except my old USB scanner, but it's crap anyway

Hi, I just installed Vista on my partioned Hard drive. I couldn't access the partition with all my files. It said "Access Denied".

I found how to access the drive. Right click on the drive then click properties. click the security tab, then go to permissions. click edit and find your user name in the list. it will then set security settings for all the files and should take a couple of minutes.