Originally Posted by NooNoo
Ok this could get very technical, but
You have to "partition" a drive (even if it is only one drive and you don't want to split it up). This creates the master boot record.... this is where the drive finds out which way is up.
Now if the partition table, or the boot record gets corrupt, the drive doesn't know where anything is and when windows tries to access it, it gets confused "messages" back from the drive, so windows says, ok, this is screwed, you wanna format?
Reasons for this corruption can be many fold, from a faulty hard drive to a virus or poorly written software.... its costs to have a post mortem done to find out what went wrong, so most people just trash it and start again.
Now you have your pictures off and presumably safe... get whatever other data you need off and then I would personally zero fill the drive (sometimes call a low or mid level format). This will wipe the drive completely and if it was a viral cause, the virus is not likely to survive. This is because the zero filler will over write every single data area, including the master boot record and partition information. You will then have to partition the drive and format it to start again. Since this is a slave and you have XP, this is simple for you.
Right click my computer, manage, look for storage and underneath you will see disk management. It will have both drives there, one will be formated, the other will be "unallocated space".
Right click on the unallocated space and allocate it, following the wizard.