Questions about my HD

[lordmask]

ok i have two Hard drives, a WD 40 gig and a WD 120 gig. 40 is master 120 is slave. i have had this set up for about a year and a half. but yesterday my 120 gig seems to be deleted kind of. windows xp sees the F drive (120 gig) but i can not access it anymore. when i do try i get a popup saying this drive is not formatted do you want to format? I went to my computer>manage and it sayas that it is healthy. so here are my questions. what happened? what can i do to avoid this again? if i format it wont that delete any information on it? is it dead?

one more thing how do i get windows xp to actually recognize it as 120 gig HD instead of 111 gig HD?

 

[Nodsu]

It could be that the drive has gone bad or the filesystem is corrupt.
Test the drive with the manufacturer utility to find any hardware failures.
You may have corrupted the filesystem by not shutting down the computer cleanly.
The windows "healthy" report is bollocks.

It will never be reported as 120GB. The 120GB advertised to you is a lie. Hard drive makers redefine the gigabyte to be less than a real GB, so they can print bigger numbers on product labels. Also, when you partition/format a drive, some space will be used for metadata and will never be usable.