new os not picking up 2nd HD

[Jester73440]

ok i recently messed up my o/s and had to reinstall. so i went from windows 2k to having both 2k and xp pro to completely formating and putting xp home on it. well i was able to access my second hard drive with no problem until i completly formated the drive with my o/s and put xp home on here. now when i click to open the harddrive it tells me " hard drive not formatted would you like to formate?" I'm only keeping xp home on here until i find win 2k pro. but i have everything on my other hard drive anyway of saving it?



thanks
-Steve

 

[eyeCpc]

In XP Home device manager go into the storage devices section and right click on the drive if seen there to choose the uninstall option. From there reboot the system. That should see a popup when XP Home prompts you with the new device found popup from the system tray. Then have Windows perform the search for drivers. It will then install it's own to see the drive now listed as a logical drive.

 

[Jester73440]

it sees its there and sees it as a maxtor. but it tells me it is unformatted and needs to be formatted. here is a picture of what i get when i click on it

 

[peterhuang913]

Then format it...

 

[Jester73440]

but wouldn't I lose everything? I kept all my music and programs on that drive(200gb+)

 

[eyeCpc]

There is one tool that will access that drive while XP is seeing it as unformatted to think about. The use of a live for cd Linux distro like Knoppix, ubuntu, and a few others will see right onto the drive since you load them when booting up from a cd-r.

You can also data recovery programs to backup the files currently on the drive to later see it reformmated for use with XP and simply restore/copy those files back onto it afterwards. You just need that same amount of space free on the XP drive for temp storage or a good dvd burner to burn some data dvds to backup files onto removable media.

That would see all files safe and allow for a refornat of the drive instead of rushing to reformat and losing everything. When and if you go backward to 2000 you may still run into an inaccessible drive without a reformat.