second HD changed drive letter and asks to be formatted

[robinhooddaffy]

my HD (1) was giving me trouble so I installed a new one  (2) and put the old one (1) as a slave drive.  It has been working fine till yesterday and the slave drive changed letters from D to F and now says that it is not formatted and asks if I want to format.  there are a couple of files that I desperately need off the slave drive.

[TOAO]

Have you tried to slave the HD off of another PC or even put into another Pc?

[patio]

This is not a good sign...did you set the jumpers correctly when you made the swap ? ?
Is it on the correct cable position ? ? (slave is the middle connector on an IDE cable )
Has there been any power issues or did you accidently dis-connect the IDE cable while powered up ? ?

One thing you can try but i give it about a one in five chance of succeeding:
Remove both drives.
Boot the machine a few times with no HDD's connected.
Set the jumper on the original HDD as master and hook it up on the end connector of IDE 1.
Power up and keep your fingers crossed...

[robinhooddaffy]

have had the second HD installed for about a month to month and a half and it worked fine.  I had changed it to a slave because it was starting to click when booting and was worried about it going bad

[GX1_Man]

have had the second HD installed for about a month to month and a half and it worked fine.  I had changed it to a slave because it was starting to click when booting and was worried about it going bad

When it started making the clicking and therefore telling you loud and clear that it was failing you should have backed up that precious data. It may be too late now.

Were both drives formatted as NTFS by chance? Is the bad drive recognized in the BIOS correctly?

Some more info about the specific hardware, etc. is always helpful.