Problems with hard drive recognition

[murasakinamida]

okay....

yesterday I had absolutely no problems with my Hard drives, but I wake up this morning and my computer will not recognise my primary slave. I use this drive for nothing but music and pictures, so there wasnt anything on there that could have really compromised it.

I finally got my computer to recognise the drive, but its not the same name (the way it appears on the boot screen) its a different number. I get to windows and i try to open the drive but it says that it needs to be formatted....I cannot format this drive. I have pictures of my family and music projects that I've been working on, so I cannot lose this information.
 
Is there anyway that I can recover the information on the drive before I have to format?

Before I forget:

I'm running a dinosaur i know:
motherboard- Asus p3v4x
OS- Windows XP Home edition service pack 2 (upgraded to sp3)
processor - Intel P3 667 MHz
640 megs of RAM

I know a little about computers, but not too much, so if someone could help me I'd really appreciate this. I cannot lose my pictures, there are pics of my kids from birth to now that no one else in our family has. 

[drmsucks]

I finally got my computer to recognise the drive, but its not the same name (the way it appears on the boot screen) its a different number. 

What did you do to get it recognized?

It sounds as if the drive may be failing. Go into Windows Disk Management and check the disk status: Start>Control Panel>Administrative Services>Computer Management>Disk Management. What status does it show for your drive?

Because of the nature of the data on the drive, if the drive can't be accessed and the data backed up, you may wish to remove it and consider data recovery specialists.

Best of luck.

[murasakinamida]

before this happened, we had a problem with one of the cables connecting the hard drive to the board. it had stopped recognising the drive as being connected to the computer because there was what looked like a small "tear" in the cable. we replaced the cable and it automatically recognised it and didnt have any problems. that was a week ago. right now it still says that the drive is connected, but it wont read from it. It just acts as if its a new hard drive and asks me to format it. when you look at the properties for the drive, it says that its completely full (which i know its not from my doing, its an 80 gig that had 70% free space before this).

right now im running a recovery program to see what i can get, and so far its picking up on a good bit of whats on there. its not completely done yet, its been scanning for a little over two hours and its almost halfway done. after this i have the option of recovering it and placing it on another hard drive. hopefully ill be able to do that and then back everything up on a data disk before I go anywhere else with it.

[drmsucks]

Good luck with your data recovery. Please post back and let us know how you made out.

Might be a good time to re-think your backup strategy!

Good luck!

[dahlarbear]

For those of us seeking knowledge:  what recovery program are you using?

[murasakinamida]

I used  GetData Software's Recover My Files Data Recovery Tool. it worked well enough for me. my husband got it from CNet's Download.com. we got all the important stuff and moved it to an external hard drive. It's a pretty decent program considering what i used it for. though I had to run the search a second time before it picked up on everything. Thanks for trying to help me you guys, i really appreciate it.