Retrieve info from a crashed emachine.

[nategslc]

Howdy,
I'm new to the forum and would greatly appreciate any help. I had an emachine W2646 and mobo died (I know, emachines mobos are crap). I believe the hard drive from that machine is still okay and there are some some pictures and other files that I would simply like to retrieve and store in another PC I have.
I removed the hard drive from the emachine, connected it as a slave to the new PC using the existing IDE cable. I don't know what I should be seeing, but I don't see the new hard drive in explorer, but it is visible in the Disk Management area of the XP control panel. The only I have is INITIALIZE. If I initialize the hard drive will it reformat the drive? (erase everything) Is this my only option? How do I map the newly added hard drive to a drive letter and make it accessible from explorer?

 

[wallabing]

Howdy,
I'm new to the forum and would greatly appreciate any help. I had an emachine W2646 and mobo died (I know, emachines mobos are crap). I believe the hard drive from that machine is still okay and there are some some pictures and other files that I would simply like to retrieve and store in another PC I have.
I removed the hard drive from the emachine, connected it as a slave to the new PC using the existing IDE cable. I don't know what I should be seeing, but I don't see the new hard drive in explorer, but it is visible in the Disk Management area of the XP control panel. The only I have is INITIALIZE. If I initialize the hard drive will it reformat the drive? (erase everything) Is this my only option? How do I map the newly added hard drive to a drive letter and make it accessible from explorer?

Initialize will not reformat.

 

[nategslc]

Initialized now what?

Ok great! Thanks for the info! I initialized the disk.
It's now listed as unallocated space. What are the next steps to making the data on disk accessible?

 

[RealBlackStuff]

You got extremely BUM info there from wallabing!
Initialize DOES wipe important parts of you HD.
If you have not done anything else yet (such as partitioning or formatting), you can still recover the old data from that HD, but you'll need to search for some good utility.
Read this here: http://ask.metafilter.com/mefi/22491