Hard Drive - I don't want to format.

[Guest]

When I was upgrading IE, something went wrong and messed up Windows. I
re-installed Windows, and everything works fine except for my slave hard
drive. When I try to access the hard drive, a message pops up saying the
disk is not formatted, do you want to format now?

I DO NOT WANT TO FORMAT.

How do I make it so that I can access the content I already have on the
drive. I do not want to format as there are files on there that I want to
retrieve.

Thanks for your help.

 

[Guest]

You will probably be able to see the drive from Recovery Console. From there
you can do a
CHKDSK D:
where D: is the drive letter.

Booting to the XP setup CD and choosing 'install' gives tu a prompt for
"Press 'R' for repair", which puts you at the recovery console prompt

 

[Ronaldo]

I suggest finding it in Control Panel\Administrative Tools\Computer
Management\Disk Management, and assigning a different letter, if the HD is
not there you may need to configure the BIOS to detect it, you may need to
check the IDE data ribbon, change the jumper setting on the slave HD,
reinstall the HD in the Device Manager or see if the HD manufacturer has
diagnostic software that may help, or disconnect the master HD and connect
the master end of the data ribbon on the slave HD to see if the BIOS detects
it, use the Windows CD (short of an intallation) just to see if that makes
the installation program detect it... and there's the possibility a data
recovery application may help to rescue your files.

Here is a similar problem, good tips there.
http://forums.techguy.org/hardware/554680-boot-problem-after-installing-maxtor-2.html

Magic Recovery download link in this page doesn't work, go to buy now and
click on the download link
http://www.software-recovery.com/dataretrieval.htm
http://www.ondata-downloads.com/MagicRecovery/magic_demo.zip