Formatting issues on a SATA drive

[Biftheunderstudy]

My girlfriend just tried to reformat her computer. She uses a 120GB IDE hard drive with a partition to install to, she then has a data drive which is a 320 GB SATA hard drive. The Install went ok, except the version of windows is one without a service pack and so couldn't recognize the 320 because of the LB adressing. When windows starts it complains that the hard drive is unformatted and wants to format...is the data gone? Is it possible that windows somehow managed to destroy the partition tables?
Everything used to work, but windows used to have a service pack before the hard drive was added.

 

[Trashman]

Why don't you download the service packs and see if data is still there?

 

[Biftheunderstudy]

Being worked on currently. I'm not with her at the moment, and a friend is going to install media center edition with SP2 to see if it works. I'm just trying to get ahead of the game and look for other options before she writes off all of the data on the large drive because windows can't keep its nose out of places it doesn't belong.

 

[Trashman]

Just leave drive alone, if data was on there, it should still be there....all ya need to do is update.

 

[Biftheunderstudy]

Oy, drive was left alone, reformatted to media center. BIOS is no longer detecting the drive at all, ported it to a friends computer--no detection there either. Gonna send her to the computer store to check it out on one of theirs then probably send it for warranty.

Its not even that old, like 5 months....