Wierd HDD problem

Hi there

So I decided to format and do a clean install of XP. On my slave I placed all my rubbish and proceeded to format my master. Everything went well except when I booted up , the data on my slave was seen as "RAW" and I couldnt get into the drive.

I did a Chkdsk etc etc to no avail.

This did happen once to me in the past and I formatted and lost everything however this time I was not going to give up. I have limited bandwidth so every bit counts :/

What I did was used Xp backup utility Accessories > sys tools > backup and made a backup of the contents on my slave. Luckily I had just enough space on my master. Once that was complete I did a quick format of the slave. I then extracted the backup [if thats what it is called] onto the slave and bam all my data was there and readable.

Now can someone explain what exactly happened and why this does happen.

Thank you