Today’s Vista Woe
I have an external USB drive that I use for backups. This morning I went to update my backup, and plugged the drive into the PC as usual. Vista responded with this prompt: "You need to format the disk in drive N: before you can use it."
This is my backup drive. The drive I would depend on if my main drive failed. Vista won't read it.
And lest you think it's some sort of hardware failure - I plugged the drive into my Mac, and even though the Mac can't write to it (it's NTFS-formatted), the Mac can see it and all the files on it. It's all there, apparently undamaged, but Vista thinks the drive isn't even formatted.
Update: It's a good thing I had an XP system here to try it with. XP mounted the drive no problem. I ran chkdsk /f on it, then brought it back over to Vista and Vista was happy with it.