xp install says slave drive needs to be formatted

[dj sidon]

I reinstalled xp on freshly formatted master drive with the slave drive in the cpu. After the install i cannot access the slave drive, message says the the drive is not formatted do you wish to format now. i do not want to do this as i backed up everything to this drive before formatting and installing on the master. microsoft support has nothing on this. i read that maybe i needed the xp sp2 and downloaded that but no difference. I am positive that i did not format the slave drive! The bios sees it but it has no file system (fat32 or ntfs) associated with the drive. I am not sure if that matters or not. anyone else have this happen to them and if so is there a fix other than trying get data back software?

Thanks for any input!!

[Paul Komski]

Hopefully something has just marked the partition as hidden but if WinXP's disk management shows the whole drive as RAW or something similar then DIY recovery may be the only way unless the partition table can be edited correcty. You could try going to the ftp symantec site at ftp://ftp.symantec.com/public/englis.../pq/utilities/ and download partinnt.zip, unzip and choose preview or copy to clipboard and post the results for the slave drive here.