Hard drive worked, but now is not formatted

[kateague]

I have a multi IDE drive system. I powered down the system and unplugged a
random hard drive, that was not the primary drive. I then plugged in a
different hard drive that I wanted to format and partition to put into a
different computer. This operation was successful. I powered down the
system, removed the temporary hard drive and reinstalled the original drive
back into the original position. When I restarted the machine, I receive a
hard drive not formatted message. How do I get the machine to recognize the
drive again with its original data as I have not deleted the data?

 

[Cari \(MS-MVP\)]

Is it recognized in the BIOS?

 

[DL]

I have to wonder why it was neccessary to format/partion the drive on this
PC, when generally it can be done on the intended PC. The winxp cd is
bootable & contains all the tools required

 

[kateague]

Yes, it is recognized in the BIOS.

Disk Management sees it too but says it's not formatted.

 

[M.I.5¾]

I have a multi IDE drive system. I powered down the system and unplugged a
random hard drive, that was not the primary drive. I then plugged in a
different hard drive that I wanted to format and partition to put into a
different computer. This operation was successful. I powered down the
system, removed the temporary hard drive and reinstalled the original
drive
back into the original position. When I restarted the machine, I receive
a
hard drive not formatted message. How do I get the machine to recognize
the
drive again with its original data as I have not deleted the data?

Did you take all proper precautions against static damage?

 

[Anna]

proper precautions against static damage?

kateague:
More times than not we've run into that problem when the user either removes
the HDD while the system is still powered on or replaces the HDD under those
same circumstances. But you've indicated your system was powered off when
you removed the HDD and, of course, the PC was powered off when you
reinstalled the HDD. (Incidentally, it's always best to remove the
computer's power cord from the A/C wall socket during these operations).

Anyway...

There's always the possibility that for one reason or another during these
operations the drive became defective or data corruption/loss occurred.
We've experienced this on a number of occasions and simply could not
pinpoint why this happened. But unfortunately it did.

If you haven't done so already, try installing the problem HDD on another
IDE channel in your system - either as Master or Slave. Ensure that the
drive is correctly jumpered and properly connected to the motherboard's IDE
connector.

If still no go, do you have another PC in which you could install the HDD?

You may have to resort to a data recovery program and try to recover the
data that way. There are a large number of programs available for this
purpose and you may want to do a Google search on "data recovery programs".
Anna