After reinstall, W7 says my 2nd hard drive is in RAW format..help

OK, so I have 2 hard drives, an SSD for my OS, and a 2nd drive that I store all my files on. I had to do a reinstall this morning, and since I understand W7 has issues installing sometimes when there's 2 discs connected, I disconnected the power and sata cable from my 2nd drive. So I install W7, and it goes fine. I turn off the computer, plug the 2nd drive back in, turn the computer on, and see the drive letter, but when I click on it, I get a message "You need to format the disc before you use it". So I'm thinking, wtf? I go into disc management and it's listed there as well, but the File System is listed as Raw. So I'm thinking, how the hell did that happen? Since W7 only takes 15 minutes to install on the SSD I use, I decided to install it once again, but leaving the 2nd drive connected this time, hoping that would somehow fix it. Nope.

So is there ANY way to fix this? My BIOS recognizes that the disc is there, as does windows...it's just telling me it's in RAW right now, and I have no clue how that happened. Oddly enough I even made an UBUNTU disc and booted to that...but from UBUNTU that 2nd drive doesn't even show up, it only recognizes the existence of my primary hard drive.

Boot free Partition Wizard bootable CD which gives even more reliable readings than Disk Mgmt.
Free Download Magic Partition Manager Software - Partition Wizard Online

You can use the Partition Recovery Wizard to see if you can rescue the partition if it doesn't show up to explore.

IF this fails, I'd boot free Paragon Rescue CD to try it's Partition Rescue function, then try to Rescue Data. Rescue Kit Free Edition | PARAGON Software Group - free partition software, hard disk partitioning

As a last resort, use free Recuva Data Recovery which can try to piece it back together after deletion: Recuva - Features

thanks! It does show up in the list of drives, I just can't explore it, as you said

Install PW on 7.

Try a partition recovery - quick scan the HD.

If it finds the partition in NTFS format - select it, OK , Apply

OK guys, update...I tried Partition Wizard...when I would select the disc in question in the recovery wizard, it wouldn't let me select 'next', so that was a dead end. Both with the program, and using the bootable cd. Next I tried something called Get Data Back, which found an NTFS partition on the drive, but when I got to the screen that should have listed all my files to recover...it was blank. I tried Paragon next and similarly it did nothing. So I gave Recuva Data a try...and here's where it gets interesting, when I select the drive in question, at the bottom of the screen it says "Unable to read boot sector". Could that be causing the issue??

RAW normally means the data is gone. I don't believe restoring the boot sector is an option if it wasn't a bootable disk.

How many partitions were on the 2nd HD ? ( doesn't matter if it's external or internal for this)

just the one partition

Try the system rescue cd. Screenshots - SystemRescueCd

If it picks the drive up as raw - see if testdisk can recover your files