i recently had to reinstall winxp and i have 2 hard drives one is the main other is for pics well before i reinstalled xp i umpluged the small hard drive that i keep pics on and well i pluged it back in and no its says unallocated. what does that mean? i hope not bad cuz i have alot of pics on their.

http://www.forensics-intl.com/def8.htmltheres you text book deffination but what exatly is unallocated? the whole drive when your in mmc or what?

Usually that means there is no partition. Just a Raw format.

are the pics able to be saved some how? and how can i get the drive to work?

Do NOT format yet!! If it was visible to XP before, it can be again. Check your device manager and such first. Since I'm not on an XP machine right now, I can't help tons. But I do know you do not need to reformat!!

the computer says that its working fine but its doesnt show up in my computer. and i cant access it.

You may need to mount the HD?

Go into your BIOS at startup. Find the option to "load setup defaults" or something of the like. Then save the changes and reboot.

Then, in XP, go into start, settings, control panel. Go to administrative tools. Go to computer management.

On the left side, go to disk management.

At the bottom, there are 3 bars. On the left of each bar it will say Disk 0, Disk 1, etc. On the right side will be a bar with diagonal lines. On the left side, right click on the diagonal lines to the right of the Disk # that represents said drive. Click "Mark Drive as Active."

Give that a shot...I recently had similar problems...

its already mounted under my main HD. all i did was turn the computer off and waited a min unplugged everything opened the case took off the power and serial cables to the HD plugged power mouse and keyboard and monitor and reinstalled win xp and after it installed i turned off the the computer and plugged the HD and power to the HD back in turned on the computer and now im were i am now.

He doesn't mean physically mounted...it'* a term used in NT environments to mean making the drive active, try the trick i posted above..;