Hi, When i booted up my computer today it got to the post and said "boot record - found",t then sat there for ages. i then installed xp on a new drive and put the broken one as slave to try and get the data off, when i go into my computer and click the drive it says "the disk in drive f is not formatted, format now?" so it wont boot up at the start and when its slave it doesnt seem formatted? any ideas??

If the drive uses FAT32, try booting up with a Windows 98 floppy disk. Type in F: and hit enter. Then type in fdisk /mbr and hit enter again. Try rebooting. If you don't know what type of file system you have (FAT32 in this scenario) then don't try this until you know for sure. I can't remember how to check, so maybe someone could offer more assistance? We are Microsoft; resistance is futile.

fdisk Y to large disk support select option 4 (view partition information) This will say FAT32 or NTFS and will not damage or change anything in the process.

the partition is ntfs, so will fdisk /mbr not work?

ok i tried booting into the console and doing "fixmbr". still wont boot and still cant be seen as a slave as it still asks me to formatt. if i go into disc management it says the drive is healthy but also says nothing under the filesystem heading. any ideas how i can get my data back? thanks