I have 2 pc's, now. The older on is a P4 2.8 on an Asus 4P800 MB.
Last time I had it reformatted I went with 2 small sata drives.
One for os and one for storage.

Last week I got a new rig and wanted to tranfer data from the storage sata to the new rig.

The new rig did not recognize the drive so I tried the sata with the os on it and pulled it was recognized and I was able to pull some programs and data off of it.

I put the storage sata back in the old pc and it shows up in Device manager but not in the menu under MY Computer.
I checked under Disk managment and it says the drive is unreadable.

I checked in the Bios and it seems to be there.
I checked again in Device manager and under Volume it shows nothing.

I know there is data on it and it was working fine prior to my moving it.

Then I remember that I was told something about 'formatting' it before I installed it the first time.

What is the best thing to do to retrieve the data?

Should I try System Restore to the time before I removed it?
Should I try to install it on the new rig? If so what is the proper procedure to do it correctly?

How do I format it if it is unreadable? How do I format it in the first place? (don't remember what I did)
I have the program called 'Recover My Files' which is awesome and worked on another old computer with IDE attached drives.

????

(Later the day)

I booted into Bios and checked the Boot section. The Hard disks are listed there but under one it states "disabled'. I tried the arrow keys but could not 'enable' it.

Is the new harddrive in your new rig SATA or PATA/IDE? You could possibly have an issue with jumpers on the back of the harddrive not being set properly. The new drive should be set as master (with slave present if it is an option on the jumpers) if it is PATA/IDE, and SATA drives (from what I've ever seen) dont have jumpers to set master/slave. I'd start there.

If you reformat the old storage drive, you will lose all the info off of it. I'd say since the old OS drive works, put both back in the old computer, fire it up, transfer the data from the old storage drive to the OS drive (assuming you have the free space) put the old OS drive into the new computer (since it is recognized) and transfer it that way. It sucks to lose all that data in a reformat so I'd try and avoid it at all costs.

Thanks sciggy.

The sata hard drive is not new and it was in a computer and I took it out and then put it back in and now it is not recognized in the MY Computer section of Windows.

It show up in Disk Management as unreadable, so Windows is not reading it.

It shows up in the bios.

Western Digital diagnostic show the drive as healthy.

I just cannot access the thing