First off, let me clearify. My system had/has 2 HDD's. The master drive was the Maxtor 40GB. The WD 250GB is the slave.
The Maxtor would not boot. After running scandisk yesterday, seems that there are all kinds of bad sectors, bad files, ect. on it. So I guess I am going to have to replace it. And as far as I know the WD 250GB HDD was working fine before so I am assuming that there is nothing wrong with it.
What I did was replace the Master HDD with an older WD 20GB to make sure that the problem was with the HDD and the MB. I installed XP with only the WD 20GB to see if I could get the system to boot up. It does so I don't think there is anything wrong with the MB.
Now, after I reconnected the slave WD 250GBHDD and tried to open it up to check that all of my (data) files were still there, XP indicates that the slave drive is no longer formatted - even though it was working fine before the Master drive went south.
So what I am trying to find out is why XP thinks the Slave is not formatted and what I can do to correct it without losing all my data on that drive - especially since I do not have any backups.
Thanks,
SkyHawk