I have a 2.5 SATA drive from an old laptop that ran Windows Vista. In addition to having the main partition with the OS, it has a "Rescue" partition on it.
I put the old drive into an external enclosure and plugged it into a USB 3.0 port on my Windows 7 machine. It first popped up the autoplay dialog for both drives and I dismissed the dialogs.
The main partition of the Vista drive was assigned the E:\ drive letter and the Vista rescue partition was assigned as F:\. I was able access the root directory of the drive and all seemed well.
I was working to take ownership of the \Users directory of the old drive, when I heard the error sound, the drive would click, and the autoplay dialog would pop up repeatedly, along with my antivirus offering to scan the portable drive. I cleared the dialogs, turned off autoplay for everything, and set the AV to not scan the portable drive.
Once I did this, the drive began doing the error sound (presumably when unmounting the drive), click, and then it was "rediscovered" by Windows, over and over again. It then finally offered me the opportunity to format both, which was strange, because it had let me look through the main partition before. It continued to cycle and trying to stop the USB connection did nothing, so I had to unplug it, much to my chagrin.
Will formatting the rescue partition on the Vista drive allow Windows 7 to forget about it mount the main Vista partition properly? If not, how do I get Windows to stop trying to mount the drive over and over again?
