I have recently gone through quite a steep learning curve and managed to clean my hard drive of all the crap and viruses on it and reinstall XP(Pro) and everything is running sweetly and faster then it was when i was swamped with spyware and viruses!

This has given me a great sense of achievement as it means I havent done my usual trick of running to PC World and parting with my hard-earned to get myself out of trouble

The only problem is that I have now re-installed a second hard drive and I am having problems with it;

The Drive is a Samsung SP4002 and has been used to store MP3s and some video files.
I detached this drive some months ago (before I formatted everything!)
Now that I am up and running again, the OS recognises the Hard Drive (size, Serial Number etc.) but does not recognise the contents of the drive - Windows keeps prompting me to format the drive (obviously I do not want to lose about 20 gig of MP3s if I can help it!!)
When I open Computer Managment - Disk Management - it says that the drive is healthy and active but does not show a file management type (NTFS or FAT) and shows a Primary partition.
Is all lost??? I cannot understand where my music has gone and i will be miffed to loose it

Any Ideas please????

I don't have tech or mod status here, but I do have some ideas for you, pal.

• Check and make sure you put the ribbon on correctly, you might have put it on upside down/backwards. I did that before and the same thing happened.
• Check the device itself and make sure it's not broken.
• Make sure your power supply/power cord to the device is functioning correctly.
• Start the computer in DOS mode and type the drive letter that hard drive would be (i.e. D:/) and then hit enter. Type dir and hit enter and see if it shows your files.
• There's also a chance that your computer may not be accepting the drive until it formats it.

And hey regular forum techs/mods, check what I said and make sure I have given correct instructions, I am very confident that I have, but I like double checks.