OK, I have (I suspect) an oncoming disaster.........

MSI 965 Platinum, e6700, 4GB of memory, 400GB SATA mirror, 500 GB SATA mirror,
250 GB SATA system. NVIDIA 8600GT, XP 64 with SP2

This system has been working fine - no abnormal blowups, no unusual crashes, just
wandering along fine..... I'm about to start a critical customer project, AND this is
the box where I do photo editing on something over 40,000 digital images.....

Couple days ago I rebooted, and when the system came up all my disk drives had
different letters EXCEPT the boot drive ©. Went into Disk Manager to see what
was going on, and there ARE NO DISK LETTERS FOR ANY PARTITION ON ANY DRIVE.

Tried to do a "Change drive letter" and got the error "The operation did not complete.
Check the System EVent log for more information on the error. Close the Disk
Management console, then restart Disk Management before retrying the operation."

In event viewer it says: VDS Basic Provider 1.0
Category: None
Event ID: 1

Unexpected Failure. Error Code: 1@01010018


Looked on the Internet and I'm not finding ANYTHING USEFUL. Not even much information.....

SO, SOMEBODY, what's going on? Motherboard problem? BIOS problem? WHAT? And
how do I fix it WITHOUT having to trash this system? I CAN, if absolutely necessary, do
a system restore from the "System Restore" but I'd MUCH PREFER to know what happened
before I start blowing things up...... If there's a better forum to get real, definitive, accurate
information on this, can somebody let me know and I'll post this over there.......

SO, What's going on?

The error means the virtual disk service is not able to speak properly to the drivers for your disks (and perhaps USB or firewire devices, if any are attached). The disks themselves are almost always just fine, but the Virtual Disk Service itself is broken. I've never found a good way of fixing this short of a repair installation, though.

Well, thanks for the response.......... I guess!

OK, so its sledgehammer time? Followed by at LEAST
three days of re-installing software........... I think I'll
try the recovery first - if its broke I don't have a lot to lose.

I'm going to take a wild guess blind folded and say that you should disable any cd/dvd/similar including usb storage devices especially if connected to SATA. I have had this problem before. Also run a complete driver update check with a third party tool as DriverMAX. free registration.

Seriously tho, if you havent done any big changes, chances are a slight power loss has made VDS gone crazy and windows has not detected your discs properly and thus VDS considered the mount points of all drives except the one it is one, c:\ (since it knows it exist, being the vds.exe resides there), it did the obsolete mount point action.

power off, unplug power cable, hit power button, wait 30 sec, plug in power cable, power back on.