Hard drive problems

[coconutboy]

Hey guys, i have a problem with my second hard drive (maxtor 60 gig on IDE 1 slave) i was installing a tv tuner card a few days ago, and my comp kept getting blue screens and had to keep restarting (i use winxp by the way) finally i got the card installed, but when i went to access my second drive for music and stuff, windows says its not formatted and would i liek to format it now! so i downloaded some software that scanned the drive, and all my files are still on the disk, i just cant access them because it wants me to format it! how do i fix this please?

[wavefront]

Yeah, the data is all there but windows isn't recognizing that partition. Is it NTSF or FAT 32 format?

[coconutboy]

its a fat32........
hmmm any way of fixing this without losing my data?

Your OS may have become corrupted. Try reinstalling windows leaving the slave alone.

[coconutboy]

hmm....well i dunno, id rather not do that.....
is there any software that would fix it? prefferably free

[wavefront]

I'd try to uninstall the TV tunner card first (since it sounds like the disk was working fine before that).

BTW what was the BSOD message(s)?

[coconutboy]

yeah i tried that too......didnt work.
im really stumped here. and i have about 30 gigs of stuff on the drive, including my mp3's and videos and stuff. i really really, dont want to lose them/

[wavefront]

Yeah, The only problem i see is that XP seems to provide only limited support for the FAT32 file system. I'm still checking the M$ Knowledge Base though.

[coconutboy]

oh thx dude
this is gonna make me cry, lol. i have like 8 gigs of music, 5 gigs of shows, 4 gigs of other vids, and like all the rest if programs and digital pics.....

[DoctorReno]

I think I would first check in Disk Management to see if the drive can be restored.