HD Problems

I just bought a new Asus a7v880, a stick of ram, and a maxtor 160gb harddrive. I only had a 30gb maxtor before (sad eh?) and now I want to run it as a slave. I have the 160gb jumpered for master or single drive (from manual) and I made the 30gb slave and the BIOS recognizes it but Windows thinks it is unformatted and I don't want to lose everything on it. The message I get says: "This drive is not currently formatted would you like to format it?". I have quite a bit of data I'd like to keep off of it.

Computer Management lists the drive as the correct 28gb and it says its healthy. It says it is a MBR partition, this shouldnt matter because its a slave? The BIOS lists it as a slave so?

You mean you are setting a blank drive as master?

The 30gb drive is from my old system, it was the master on that system. yesterday I bought a new mobo, and a new 160gb hard drive. I only attached the 160gb and installed windows xp home. Now when I attached the 30gig as a slave windows thinks it isn't formatted I had some stuff I'd like to transfer over.

Bump! Help please! Most programs I'm trying says it is a RAW drive? What is that?

I would try this.While powered down remove the secondary ide ribbon from the mobo.boot up and go to device manager and uninstall the 30 gig from there.Go to control panel and click the add new hardware.It should search and find the drive for you.Do not allow it to reformat!

Thanks but I just fixed it by copying the damaged partition over to my new hardrive using PartitionMagic and it worked. Actually funny enough it didn't copy it over, it actually just repaired the old partition :S? Which was great even thought I didn't tell it to lol! Windows says my old Documents folder is inaccessable and accesss is denied.

Do you have administrative properties? If you don't that's maybe why the folder is inaccessible.

Because I'm running WindowsXP Home I had to go into Safe Mode as Administrator to switch Ownership. It worked and now I have all my old files back. Thanks guys! BTW I found that out on the Microsoft site.