XP lost my hard drive

Help.
After a re-install windows will no longer show my “assets” hard drive in my computer.
It shows up fine in bios startup.
I have even tried disconnecting my master drive and making the assets drive a master and boot from cd xp sp2 but windows says that it cannot use the disk without deleting the partition.
How can i get back the important data that is on the disk?

is the “assets” HDD the only HDD in / on your system

have you tried to Repair your Windoze instalation ?

presumably your system will not boot from HDD, why ? please explain the situation

Edit: at some point we may require your system specs, so what are they ?

500gb ide slave “assets”
repaired then re-installed xp
master booting ok