Program Cannot Access a Raw Partition on Your Computer's Hard Disk

IMPORTANT: This article contains information about modifying the registry. Before you modify the registry, make sure to back it up and make sure that you understand how to restore the registry if a problem occurs. For information about how to back up, restore, and edit the registry, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base: When a program tries to access a raw partition on your computer's hard disk, the partition may not be available.

Note A raw partition is a partition on your hard disk that is not formatted and that does not have a drive letter assigned to it.

This problem occurs because, by default, the AutoMount feature of the Mount Manager (MountMgr) program is turned off in the Microsoft Windows registry.

To resolve this problem, turn on the AutoMount feature. To do this, follow these steps:

1. Click Start, and then click Run.
2. In the Open box, type cmd, and then click OK.
3. At the command prompt, type MountVol /E, and then press ENTER.

After you follow these steps, the following registry key is changed from the default setting of 1 to a setting of 0:

Some computer software manufacturers use raw partitions to store their data in.

The default behavior in all other versions of Windows is to automatically mount any newly added disks.

On any computer that is running Windows Server 2003, you can turn off the AutoMount feature by using the MountVol /N command.