Windows 7 - Can't access old hard drive after new SSD and Windows 7 install

Hey guys this is my first time posting, after searching the web I've found problems similar to this but no clear answers on fixing. I recently purchased a new Mother Board (Gigabyte G1.Guerrilla) not really thinking about the repercussions of changing such a large component. I hooked everything up and of course windows would not load. I did not want to do a clean install as I have 3 years worth of pictures and video on my hard drive. So I looked at this as an opportunity to purchase a new Corsair 60gb SSD.

My thinking was I can use this as by OS drive and would then still be able to access and use the files on my original Seagate 750gb mechanical drive as a data drive. After a couple of hiccups with the Windows installation, (done without the Seagate installed) everything was installed. I then turned off the PC hooked up the second HDD up via SATA II and windows booted fine after setting boot order.

Now when I click on My Computer it shows my SSD fine, but the older HDD shows as a generic disc drive. When I click on it, it says something about being an unsupported or unrecognized file system and asks if I would like to format now? Which I obviously don't want to do. I also have an issue with SATA III but thats for a different post.

Here's my setup:

intel Core i7-920
Gigabyte g1.guerrilla
6gb Corsair XMS 1333 Ram
PNY GTX 470 1.25gb
60gb Corsair Force 3
750gb Seagate Barracuda

Any help would be appreciated!

Hi CommZod and welcome to the forum!

For starters, could you go to Disk Management, maximize the window and post a screenshot of it here?

Screenshots and Files - Upload and Post in Seven Forums

Here's what it looks like in Disk Management

The reason it's not showing is because the file sys say's RAW and needs to be NTFS but i'm not sure how to change it. Don't do anything drastic until someone answers on how to change it.

Im not touching anything until I know what to do! My wife would kill me if I lost all pictures on there!

Gooood point

It sounds like you did everything right. The only problem I ever get doing that exact thing is that the drive will show up as "Forein" and you have to "Import" it and then it's fine. But the drive is already imported from the looks of it. Saying the format is "RAW" is worrying...

My guess is that you will be looking at using a drive recovery tool to try to repair the formatting and get the data off or at least backed up. The drive wasn't bitlockered or encrypted with tru-crypt or anything? Just a plain ol NTFS drive?

yep, just a plain drive. Any good suggestions on a recovery tool?

This is not a good scenario. I would try to pull the data off with a live Linux CD. Too bad you did not backup your "precious" data in the first place. Once you were able to recover your files you can reformat that disk in NTFS and put the files back.

Here is a Linux program I have used previously: Computer First Aid Using Knoppix

A good first step would be trying Recuva on the harddisk - I've seen others have the same problem (filesystem suddenly becoming RAW) and Recuva always seemed to enable them to get all their files off.

Another option is to attempt a partition recovery/repair with Partition Wizard. Again, others having this problem have reported that PW started finding and repairing errors until at some point Windows started seeing the filesystem again.