Xp States hard drive not formatted ! (Oh yes it is ) Help please

[noely1]

Hi,
I am running a sempron 3000 on XP prp SP2, with a 120gb primary drive (c & D) and an 80gb secondary slave drive (G & H). I noticed the other day that my G & H drives were not showing up in explorer. when i restarted the pc, the slave drive is being recognised in the bios. I went to disk manager and was able to turn the drive back on somehow.
The main problem is that when i click on either G or H ireceive the message that the disk is not formatted !.
The G drive contains many of my precious digital photos (yeh, yeh should have backed up) I took the drive out placed it in an external HD enclosure, tried that. Received the same error, tried it on my laptop running XP home, same message, tried it on my old PC running windows ME and am able to acess the G drive no problem. The only problem is that the HD in this old PC is not big enough to copy the data across from the G drive.
Anyone any ideas why XP wont recognise the format? and how i can sort it out.

Thanks Noel

 

[tipstir]

How big is your power supply? WATTS I mean. If you only have 350W It might not be enough to power those HDDs you'll see them not show up under Windows. They may show up when you first bootup the PC. Also if the PS is okay then check your IDE Ribbon cables for color changes. They don't last forever. You might have to replace them also.

 

[tipstir]

One more thing you can do is get a USB2 External HDD kit they're cheap and what that comes with is a CASE for the HD which can go up to 400GB for Ultra IDE and SATA I think it's 300GB. Anyway it's easy to install the HDD into one of these case they also come with the power supply and USB2 cable. Now if you don't have USB2 you can use it as USB1.1 just a tad slower but you might not notice it. If you can try it this way if the drive shows up then you have a PS problem with your main system case.

 

[noely1]

Hi,
Thanks but My power supply is 400 watts, my external hard drive enclosure has a separate power supply so i can rule that out.
Any other ideas
thanks Noel