[OHSHIT] Help (Disk says not formated)

I have 2 HD's in my computer, one is a 80GB WD and the other is a 300GB HD. I just re-formatted the 80gb HD to install windows XP on it again. For some reason, XP now says that my other HD (300gb with ALL my files and school stuff on it) is not in NTFS format, but Fat16. It asks's me to format it when I try to go to that drive. WTF do I do?

This is definatly a touchy situation. I would try booting from a knoppix CD to see if you can access the drive from there. If yes I would offload everything to another drive and start fresh.

If not then things may start getting hairy. I know that there are ways to repair this issue. However I don't want to recommend this until I can do more research into it.

Whatever you do do not attempt to write anything to the drive.

I truly hope you have backups of all your important files.

look for the patch that allows your pc to support hdd over 137 gig.