HardDisk data not recognised, please help!

[theCheetah]

I had 2 HDs on my old pc(win XP). About 2 weeks back I took out on HD and kept it inside a drawer(nice cool place). Today I bought a new pc(win XP) and installed that HD in it. Now my new pc has a 36G SATA HD as the primary disk. I installed the old ATA HD as a master and connected it on the second IDE slot. My new pc can recognise the HD, assigns a new drive name(E but when I double cilick on it it asks me to format it. When I right click on it and select properties, it says the HD is in RAW format. What did I do wrong, and how can I resolve it. I am seriously scared, all my college project work is on this HD. Please help. Any help/info welcome.

 

[mechBgon]

If you have the old PC still there, put the drive back into it and start by copying that data onto CDs or DVDs, or a portable drive, or over the network if you have one.

If not, go to Control Panel > Performance & Maintenance > Computer Management and go down to Storage > Disk Management like this. Now right-click the drive and see if it wants to be Imported. For example, I would right-click Disk 0's grey square and see what my options are.

 

[theCheetah]

I donated my old working PC to Salvation Army, so I don't have it now. I tried yours suggestion, but I don't see anything helpful. When I right click it opens a menu giving me options like: open/explore/change driveletters and paths/format/delete partition/properties/help. Nothing else.

 

[mechBgon]

Eeeek :Q The safest bet would be to ship the drive out to a data-recovery outfit. The only data-recovery software I've tried myself was mainly to dabble with it... http://www.pcinspector.de and they have freeware data-recovery software you could try.

 

[theCheetah]

Thanks, I will try this free software first!

 

[Pariah]

Try here. It's not free, but to me, my important data is worth the price of this utility. It's saved my ass muliple times when drives seemed completely lost with no partition information or anything remaining. There is a demo available for download which will search the drive and display the file tree of what it finds, so you should know if it will be able to recover your data before you purchase it.