I am running XP Professional. I have a seagate hard drive. I purchased another 250 gig hard drive with information on it. I want to access the information. I opened my computer and attached the new hard drive to the ribbon my other hard drive was connected to. After reboot, I can see the hard drive as drive "D". However, when I try to access it in windows explorer, I get a message that says Drive D, not formatted and it asks me if I want to format. Of course I say no. If I look at properties, I can see the drive identified, but anything on the volume descriptions shows nothing. I am confident that there is information on the drive. I don't know if I have set the jumpers correctly.

Please help with any advice.....

If both drives are identified in windows then your jumpers are set OK, if they weren't then neither drive would be visible because of conflicts.
Can you see the information on the other drive if you check the contents from the C: prompt?

If you have an 80 core IDE ribbon set both drives to CS with your C:\ drive on the end with the GREY connector and your D:\ drive on the BLACK connector, the BLUE end should be plugged into your motherboard. If you have a 40 core IDE cable set your C:\ drive to master (MA) and your D:\ drive to slave (SL). This should cure your problem assuming both drives are OK.

I have the same exact problem but my HDDs are SATA. They were both NTFS. I reformatted my first HDD (C) and kept all my info on my second HDD (D). Now i reinstall XP home, go to my computer and when i try to access my D: drive it says D: is not formatted. Would you like to format? I cant have that. I have 300GBs of data I cant afford to lose. In disk management, My first drive is correct. My second drive only shows 128 GB but it is actually 300GB. Can this be due to lack of SATA drivers? What can I do to solve this problem. All cable connections are correct and firm. Thank you.

I'll do that then. Thx