HD all of sudden needs to be FORMAT ???!!!

[kaiotes]

i bought a stick of the PNY 256mb sdram pc133 ram.
installed it in system.
then when i tried to get stuff frorm my existing HD, (I have two)
all of a sudden, the secondary master HD in XP says, do i wanna format it.
i had stuff on it !!!! ITS NOW ALL GONE??!!!
i don't think i have much important stuff on it and it is not the bootable HD, but WTF, why all of a sudden the need to format it to be able to use it???!!!
i dind't touch any of the cables etc, the only tihng that i think might have happened maybe i short circuited by moving around the cables??? but thats not possible!
is there any program that can let me go back to retrieve the data i assume is lost forever????
system restore wasn't of much help

 

[Jeff7]

I assume that you had the system off when working in it? (don't be offended; this needs to be mentioned though)

With the system off, try jiggling the cables and make sure that they're all plugged in all the way.

I've found System Restore to be good if you made a backup in the past few days, and even then it's not the best. It only records a few files and settings, and they expire after some amount of time.

 

[kaiotes]

system was working fine and now still works. except stuff is all gone as its forcing me to format.
bios detects the drive and stuff .

 

[Jeff7]

Is the secondary drive FAT32 or NTFS? If FAT32, boot off a floppy and see if you can see anything on the drive that way. Use this boot disk "image" on a disk and use that.
In either case, when you've booted off the floppy, run Fdisk. Change the fixed drive to the D:. Then Display partition information - check what kind of partition it says it's using.

I'm just thinking of anything I can here; I've little experience with data recovery.