I have been having some major computer problems....I finally got the 2nd hard drive to be "registered" on my computer without my computer crashing. However, it is only being recognized as 1.97active and 184.3 gb "unallocated"(it is technically a 200 gb drive, but of course you don't actually get that amount.) How can I retrieve the old data that I have saved on it?

I've had some success with PC Inspector File Recovery in the past. It has the ability to go out to the raw disk and read off whatever files are salvagable. You need a separate drive to save your files to, but it's saved me a few times. Don't expect miracles, you might not get everything back. If nobody else has a better suggestion that can let you get your whole drive back, give this a shot.

I recently went through this with some of my drives. I went to http://www.ntfs.com where they have demos of their programs. The good thing about it was I was able to see my data was still on my drive. Then I decided to buy one of their programs, and after much trying with the full version, I still couldn't get my data. I could still see it was there, but couldn't get at it. Fired up Partition Magic and had everything back in 5 minutes. So in my situation, I just wasted $30 on a program that did nothing. But they do have free tools so you can verify your data is on your drive.

Edit: Looking back I see you never mentioned what kind of system you are trying to recover data to. Mine was using Win XP

I have Windows 2000...How much does it cost for Partition Magic?

$70.00

Search this forum for "Getdataback" (just like that). There's been a few threads about this, and that is the name of the program I used, which worked perfectly.

Getdataback is brilliant and will even recover data from ntfs drives which have had the partition removed.
PM me if you'd like the details.

The only software that I have found with which I can actually see the data that was "lost" is R-Studio. However, I am broke at the moment and I cannot afford to buy it at the moment.

Did you try Getdataback for NTFS? If you did and it didn't work, sorry about that. If you haven't, try the demo they have available (or did when I tried it). If it works, pm me and we'll talk about the high cost of the full version