Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know - VISTA! Anyhoo, I have this laptop that I am preparing to give to my father. He is currently running a desktop on XP so a move to Vista will have a slightly less learning curve for an old guy than a move to Win 7. It's a Toshiba Satellite and has a number of sweet apps by default that he will find useful. 

So, it's been unused for awhile and had a heap load of Windows updates to run through. It took 21 hours to download them all (my speed was rubbish) and I don't know at what stage the following happened but I don't have time to restore back to factory and start again. 

One hard drive. 3 partitions - the Toshiba recovery partition, a small primary boot drive, and the third with all the apps and data. I'd uninstalled apps with no problems during the earlier part of the night and the F drive was accessible. 

After finishing the updates, I clicked on the start menu and nothing happened. Somewhere in its updates, which were overseen and uninterrupted, the laptop has lost the drive letter. I see it in admin, but its not being recognised and I cant allocate a letter to it.

In diskpart, it shows the partition but no volume. Without the volume I cant assign a letter to it. So, currently 200GB is sitting there unable to be accessed. 

Does anyone know how to get that back without doing a clean install? The recovery disk would take it right back to pre SP1 and I don't have another 24 hours to get it up and running. Its on a plane with me first thing in the morning. HELP!!!