TSGL: Slave drive not seen

[Don Penlington]

I'm setting up a new computer for a friend. He has had the hard drive from 
his old computer temporarily installed as a slave drive on the new computer 
so that he can extract his files from it. (His old computer suddenly failed 
for some unknown reason and he has no backups).

The new system is XP SP2 with AVG a-v and Zone Alarm Pro, which I have 
installed for him.

The 2nd drive is seen as a slave in bios, and is seen with no details other 
than its name ("WD.....") and size in Device Manager, which says it's 
working OK.

It is not visible in My Computer, nor in Drive Management.

I have tried uninstalling its driver in Device Manager and rebooting, but 
that didn't make any difference.

I have run "Restore" which is a data recovery utility, but it doesn't see 
the old HD either.

Is there any way I can make it readable?   I could possibly try 
partitioning the old drive via the XP CD, but I fear that that process will 
wipe all existing data, and I don't want to risk that. I'm not sure if it 
would even show up or whether it would be effective in any event.

If the old drive was "cooked", would Device Manager and BIOS still see it?

Any suggestions on how to make the old drive visible? Otherwise I'll get 
him to take it into the local shop which built the computer to see what 
they can do.

Don Penlington
 From the Beach at Surfers Paradise in sunny Queensland.
Computer tutorials, local scenery,  and other things at my website:
http://users.tpg.com.au/deepend/index1.html