Question : Problem: USB Drive

A drive that I plug into the USB port will show up in disk management ( the partitions are shown) but will not show up in windows explorer, that is the system won't give it a drive letter.  When I right click one the device in disk management, all of the options are grayed out except delete volume. Of course this is on the deadly Vista operating system, so it's probably trying to protect me from myself again. Other drives have no such problem.

Answer : Problem: USB Drive

The problem is that Windows Vista fails to detect that your external HDD has NTFS file system. Do you have a machine that detects this drive? If yes, then connect the drive to it, then copy out all data from it and delete the two volumes from this drive. Then connect it to Vista machine and create new partition on it using Windows Disk Management.