Hard Drive "Not Formatted" after clean install

Hello:

I have a computer that I did a clean install of Windows XP last night, and then afterwards, one of my hard disks (which had worked fine before) now says something like "Drive not formatted, would you like to format now?" when I try to access it.

Some history prior to this:

I did all this because I came home one day and this computer (my back up computer for video editing) was frozen up. My best guess is that my little kids were hitting the keyboard and such, as they often to to my chagrin and have caused very weird problems in the past which I've had to fix. Otherwise, I've had absolutely no problems at all recently. When I got it restarted, windows would not load; neither from regular start, safe mode, last good save, etc. So, I tried instructions from both (1) http://www.short-media.com/review.php?r=313 and (2)http://www.informationweek.com/windo...leID=189400897 which had saved me before with a different computer. When I followed the first instructions, something weird happened where I reconfigured the boot.ini, but then the bootsector was written to a different drive other than C: (I think the disk which I'm having problem with?). I could not get that to work, so I tried the second instructions, but I could not get the windows installer to recognize an old windows install to fix; which I could not figure out after much reading on the internet.

This particular computer had 3 hard disks installed and was running Windows XP SP2. I bought a new hard disk last night and installed it, then performed a new, clean install of Windows XP SP1 onto that new disk.

However, to be honest, this new disk is the same model as another disk that I already had installed and I have about a 1% concern that I may have installed over an older disk (the one that I am thinking that I'm having problems accessing - I hope this makes sense).

But, I'm almost certain that did not happen because when I chose which disk to install Windows on, I chose the disk which was not assigned a drive letter and was not partitioned (hence, it seemed quite reasonable that this was the new disk).

Anyway, when I accessed my disks on the Drive Management, the disk that I'm having problems was not "active", so I set it to active, but this did not help.

I've never had a problem like this at all before, so I'm really at a loss of what to do, and frankly, I'm a little freaking out because I have about 250GB of DV tapes captured to that disk! Thankfully, I have all the old tapes, but this took many, many hours of work I had not backed up this particular disk yet because of this huge size; but I had planned to do exactly that with this new disk I bought/installed.

I've done nothing else after installing (except a few updates before I noticed this problem) btw.

So, a couple thoughts I have, but I have no idea how to do this:
1. Is there a way to access a disk in windows which the OS is saying "is not formatted", without losing my data? Is this some sort of bug?
2. Is there a way to check the local disk to see if I did, indeed re-partition my old drive? This way, I might at least know so I don't waste any more time figuring this out?
3. When I tried the instructions at http://www.short-media.com/review.php?r=313 and if a new bootsector was written to this disk which I'm having problems with, is there a way to check for this? or fix this? or does that not make sense?

Thanks!

 

Hmmm... I found this post as well as this one; I may give a try with some recovery software (google: free data recovery). The worst thing that will happen is that I'll have to recapture a huge stack of DV's which, I had planned to encode all those movies in Xvid some day anyway. Either way, at least I have disk space to back them up now.

 

If you don't know which drive is which, take them all out and put them back one at a time until you find the system (windows) disk.
Once you have done this put the others back, one at a time checking in disk manager what is on them.
Make sure you have all the master/slave jumpers correctly set.

Studio T