Not just any not detected problem. I suspect the drive is on the verge of a catastrophic failure, and was about to pull everything off it when it gave me the classic disk-not-formatted error. I shutdown immediately and pulled it out. Yesterday I bought Recover My Files software to try to uh.. recover my files. However, although the disk is detected in Award BIOS (albeit showing 100% free space but I'm dead sure the data's still there and has not been overwritten), it does not show up in either Explorer, Device Manager or Disk Management. [At this point I thought of reformatting the drive to make XP recognize it since the software can recover files from a lost partition.] But realized couldn't since it wasn't even showing up in Disk Management (unformatted disks can be detected and formatted from there). Neither did my faulty drive show up in Windows XP Setup. I'm quite sure the drive is not suffering from any mechanical failure (yet). It's just that for now I have no idea how to get the stuff off it. There is the occasional clicking sound as well in about 45-minute intervals (hence the trying-to-backup). Does anyone have any idea at all how I can recover my files, given the above scenario? Cheerio, Nicholas.
Seriously, if this is the kind of response I'm going to get after waiting for so long, then I am severely disappointed with this community.
Maybe your original post is too long! Get a program that reads the SMART report from your drive. It will tell you if the drive is almost dead. If it all comes back clear then your partition table or MBR is corrupted. Try a linux live cd. The ubunu one is the easist one to get along with though Knoppix is also a good live cd.
