XP on my old hard drive crashed, and for whatever reason I was not able to reinstall it (disc read error, press ctrl, alt, delete).I figured it had somehting to do with XP, so I got a new harddrive, installed XP and now I am trying to add my old harddrive back, so I can transfer my files.

New drive works great.

I went ahead and connected by old drive to 2nd SATA port on the motherboard, but for some reason it does not show up in XP. How do I fix this?

-adnan

If the MBoard doesn't configure SATA controllers natively you need to install them.

Look in Disk management to see if the drive shows there. If so you may need to take ownership of the files. Look below to see how.

Watch the startup screens to see if that SATA drive is showing there. If not, you may need to Enable that controller in the BIOS.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/308421

Ok, I just enabled in it BIOS and it shows up in XP.

However, I cant access it in XP because it says it needs to be formatted. But I don't want to do this because I need my old data. How do I go about this? Do I use some kind of software?

-adnan

What capacity are each of your drives and what service pack is installed?

New drive has OE XP sp2 from a year ago. 360 GB

Old drive had the same, except it was more up to date (it crashed last night). 80 GB

Hmm, I just tried this program called file inspector and I can view the harddrive, but when it goes to recover it starts giving me errors.

For example,

"error no. 23

drv: 129LBA:6371781

blocks : *"

and it gives me the option to abort, retry, ignore.

Is it possible that the drive is permenently damaged?

-adnan

You didn't comment on how the two drives are identified in the startup screens. The 360GB drive should have 360 as part of the model number.

I'm not sure what you are asking.

Are you talking about the names of the drives in BIOS?

The 360 one is a Western Digital:
WDC WD3200AAKS-00B 3A0

The 80 is a Seagate:
ST3808198F

-adnan

The 360 is a 320. That information means your BIOS is configuring the drives correctly.

When you first installed WinXP to the 320GB drive did you use a CD that had at least service pack one integrated on the CD? If not, that is your problem. Post back.