I re installed xp on my computor and it was a clean install. now i cannot access my slave back up and it has info i need IE my back up. the computor says it is unallocated.. help'

Joey

Raw: The volume filesystem type information is unavailable
http://www.z-a-recovery.com/unformat-tutorial.htm

Just follow the guide
I feel you have removed the Partion, inadvertently, on the slave Drive

In future, physically unplug any other drives, before doing major work (Partion/Format/Windows Setup) on another Drive

so i wipe it clean and now should partition in and move forward.? will i still be able to reassign a letter to it?

If you have data to be backed up, I wouldn't be doing any other work on it, other than trying to recover it (see link above)

But once you are happy with not recovering anymore data from it, you can then create a Partition (and format it) on it, which will automatically allow Windows to assign a new drive letter for it

Have a look at Control Panel-->Administrative Tools-->Computer Management-->Disk Management
From there you can Format so forth (only after you have recovered data first!)