Help... Corrupted HDD

I've done something dumb, and I really need help resolving my mistake. I took out my DVD drive and replaced it with my old one (cause I need to return the new one, to much money) but I forgot to set it as the master.. Well I was having major problems running my computer, and tried running it like 5 times until I took out my Disk Drive and looked at it realizing I forgot to set it as a master.

In the bios it finally said all the drives were recognized and it was all good. Than I got into Windows (vista) to see if my D drive was OK and it now says;

"The file or directory is corrupted and unreadable"

Shit... so I go into Error check and it says, "disc is unreadable". Crap crap crap, what do I do?

Please!!

I'm assuming your D: drive is an IDE hard drive that is set to slave, and that your primary C: drive is an SATA hard drive.

I would make sure the IDE cable is connected properly on the IDE hard drive. When you were removing and replugging the DVD drive you might've pulled the IDE cable too much or bumped it out of place from the hard drive. Usually wrong jumper setting on either IDE device does not corrupt a hard drive.

Replugged everything, still nothing. Crap crap

Maybe a driver issue? I would check device manager to see if your old drive that you newly installed again is showing up. This is only a guess, and not even an educated one really. Good luck.

I recovered all the files I wanted to.. thank god. But I just need to figure out how to save my hDD... dont want to buy a new one.

If you've recovered all the important files, then you can delete the current partition on that hard drive and then create a new partition and format it. Possibly the hard drive is still good physically, so I dont think you need to worry much.

You can do all this in Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Computer Management, and then scroll down till you see Disk Management, click on it. You can then select the hard drive you want (make triple check its the right hard drive that you want to delete partition and reformat).

Hmmm. thanks SOSTrooper. I got all the way to where you said to delete partition and reformat. How do I delete the partition at the Computer management screen?

*Got it! Thanks, woohoo. Hdd recovered!*