I tried several partition/data recovery programs all to no avail (or didn't want to pay for them!). finally got around to Find and Mount (http://findandmount.com/). Ran an intelligent scan. Took about 2 minutes. Found the original partition, mounted it, and bingo! the drive shows up in windows explorer with all the data on it where it should be!
I had a hard drive (300GB IDE Seagate Barracuda) in an old desktop PC that I used to store music and other media on (another drive was used for the Os etc). Now that I've replaced the desktop with a laptop, I wanted to use the desktop as a basic NAS. I did a complete factory reset of the PC (Dell Inspiron) before which I disconnected the second HD. After setting up Windows, I reconnected the drive, booted up and when I tried to access the drive I was told by Windows XP that the drive was not formatted and would I like to format it (which I said no to). What gives? What could have happened to the drive? What can I do to recover the drive to operating status without damaging the other contents? I know I could simply format it, but I'd like to recover the thousands of files I had stored on it!

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