Second HDD unallocated after Win7 reinstall

Hello all.

I have had a very perplexing problem arise. I recently purchased an Intel 320 120GB SSD for my new gaming rig. I had all my personal info and downloads on a second 500GB SATA drive. After I installed Win7 Ultimate 64 on the SSD my 500GB drive is coming up unallocated in disk management. It is really throwing me for a loop. If have disconnected the drive several times and still have had no luck.

Any ideas or suggestions? It wouldn't be a huge problem to reformat but there are several files I REALLY need back, everything else is just a download away.

I wonder if it's what happened to me a couple of years ago while reinstalling XP. Two of my hard disks appeared as unallocated, and with capacities like 30MB or 723MB instead of 1TB. I fixed it with this (free) tool:

http://blog.atola.com/restoring-fa [...] -capacity/

Don't try formatting your disk. I did that with one of my disks. The tool restored the disk's capacity but I lost the files on it. On the other drive, after running the tool, all my files were still fine.

I did find a page, eventually, somewhere on Microsoft's site, recommending that you disconnect all drives before installing Windows, leaving only the drive where you wish to install, of course. Too bad I read that AFTER the fact