Yesterday I got a KERNEL_STACK error while I was working. Long story short,we removed our primary hard drive so that we could reinstall XP without deleting everything on the primary drive. We put a blank hard drive in, installed XP and then installed the hard drive with all our stuff on it as a slave. It shows up in the device manager, so we know it's installed properly. But it does not show up as a drive in "My Computer". I did a little digging and it seems it needs to be formatted in order to show up. Won't that erase everything? That's what I'm trying to avoid. Please help!

http://www.easeus.com/datarecoverywizard/do-data-recovery.htm

You don't want to format the drive. I assume the drive was formatted with NTFS? Does the problem slave drive show correctly in the BOIS and/or startup screens. If so the drive appears to be mechanically OK. You could try accessing the drive using a product like Knoppix Linux. If the files are intact but the file structure is corrupted Knoppix may be able to access the files. I'm not knowledgeable enough to advise you on repairing the error but it might be possible. Google "Kernel Stack error" and you will get a number of hits.

Hopefully Vista will correct this bizzare XP issue. Unfortunately nobody has it down to science - not even M$. Some users were lucky enough to get around it by switching IDE channels with other devices, while others resorted to an external caddie to get access to it in XP. Whatever you do, you definitely shouldn't format it.

But it does not show up as a drive in "My Computer". A shot in the dark, why not try taking Ownership and see what happen. i_XpUser

Also try 'Rescan disks' in the Disk Manager. Another thing to try is assigning/changing the drive letter in the Disk manager. Do yourself a favor BACKUP!

I am scanning the drive right now with a demo version of a disk recovery program. It appears that most everything can be recovered. I do have some questions though. Am I to assume that all my e-mails and e-mail addresses are lost forever or can those be recovered as well? I also assume I have to reinstall all the programs I had in my program file on the "bad" drive. I don't mean to sound naive, I just have never had this happen before. I once had a virus wipe out my entire hard drive, nothing could be recovered. So I'm thankful that didn't happen. I just don't know what I can expect if I purchase this recovery software.