Short and sweet.
I put my old hard drive in a new computer and I see the drive, but whan I click on it it says "Drive x is not formatted, do you want to format it..." NO I don't want to format it. It was good 5 minutes ago...
I hooked it up to an external USB cable to try to read it that way, but I get the same message.

Google gives all kinds of reasons for this.....darn it, there are lots of photos on it....

Anyone here get that?

I would use Ontrack Easy Recovery Pro on it if I had the drive. There are other downloadable utilities on the net that just search for photos on "dead" drives. Don't format it.

Just google "photo recovery" or "file recovery"

Sorry to hear about this. That same problem has happened to me for no reason too just like yours. Dont remember what I did to fix it but if I remember I will let you know.

What did it come out of '5 minutes ago'?
What usually happens in cases like this is that the new hardware uses different drive parameters than the old hardware did. I would put it back in the old hardware and make sure its fine then grab the parameters off the bios screen, then move the drive to the new hardware and manually set the bios parameters to exactly same as the old hardware. This works 90%+ of the time to fix the issue but occasionally there are chipset differences

Good luck.

How is it formatted? What OS to what OS?

The drive is from an old XP box to a new XP box. It is an NTFS drive.

Today I took it in to where I purchased the new computer because they offer free data transfer. They just called me to say the drive has failed. they couldn't get data off of it.
I did put it back into the original computer and it recognizes the drive at POST boot, and in the BIOS, but it gets stuck at "Verifying DMI Pool Data....."
But then it sits there doing nothing....

It seems to be more of a software, like the boot sector failure than a hardware failure which gives me hope of recovering the data..

I am going on-line to try a data recovery software package.
I need my tax files and pictures most importantly...game data would be nice too.
Any suggestions as to what software will grab all that?

Boot off the xp cd then run chkdsk and see what you get. If thats ok run fixboot followed by fixmbr and see what happens.

I have the drive setup in my new computer as a second drive. It shows under My Computer as drive F, but when I enter it in a cmd prompt it says, "The volume does not contain a recognized file system. Please make sure that all required file system drivers are loaded and that the volume is not corrupted."

I am trying a program called ZAR to read the data

SUCCESS!
I installed the trial version of ZAR and it worked! I can see my data and successfully restored 4 folders (the max allowed in the trial version).....
Two tax and two picture folders have been restored.
what a great feeling..

Tonight I am going to purchase a copy of data recovery software so I have a hard copy.

I would hate to have paid for a downloaded copy and have it go away if my HD fails..again....

thanks for the tips anyway

Grats!