Ok so today i took the time and got my harddrive out of my broken laptop and hooked it up to my desktop directly through the power supply and to the motherboard. It could detect the harddrive and everything in my computer. It had a partition volume that i was able to open but I could not open the real drive, it just froze windows explorer. So next I went into Disk Management and found it there. When I right click on it and press open it says:
The disk in drive E is not formatted.
Do you want to format it now?
yes no
Am I wrong? formatting means erasing everything on the harddrive? Because i do NOT want to do that.
Any ideas how to access my files?
BTW: if this is helpful info,
-the harddrive is not one of those external harddrives
-the harddrive comes from Windows 7
-the computer i want the files on is Windows XP
-yes i have restarted my computer after attaching the harddrive after being prompted to
edit: i really could use the help ASAP