Hi.

Earlier today I clean re-installed Windows XP Professional. I backed up alot of useful data on my second hard drive, and proceeded with the reinstallation. Everything went smooth, but when I double clicked my second hard drive in My Computer, it gave the message:

"The disk in drive D is not formatted.

Do you want to format it now?"

If i proceed with this, all the data on that hard drive will be wiped out.

Is there any possible way to recover the date from the hard drive?

what File System are you using? ie: Fat32 or NTFS?
Make sure that both hd's have the same file system, otherwise you're going to have to reinstall on the same fs.

Try reading it in Linux or BeOS.

...or DOS. Do you have Partition Magic?

I discovered the problem.... I accidentally deleted the FAT32 partition on the second hard drive while trying to delete the NTFS partition on my main hard drive (but I realized i needed DELPART.EXE to do so).

Thanks for all your help everyone, but the data on that HDD is long gone.

Sorry to hear that, but at least you figured out what you did.

You can still use an unerase wizard to recover some of the data, remember, the FAT table is just a list to where the files are, so the files are still on your harddrive...

I know Symantec has one such utill...

If he formatted over the partition he deleted it wouldn't work

If you just deleted it, then yeah, it will.

A full format only deletes the FAT and runs a scandisk on all sectors, it doesn't remove the data...

To do that you will either have to do a "secure format" (offered in PartitionMagic for example)

Or use a program which low level formats the harddrive (writes zeroes to all sectors...)

(Note: The "usual" format program is a so called "high-level" format program)

For more information about this click this link:

http://www.storagereview.com/welcome...hCapacity.html