Parameters Problem HELP!

Ok, I'll do my best to discribe the problem. I have a WD HD that I've been using for about a year as a slave drive (D:/). Through other problems that are too long to go into here, so here is the link to that problem (http://forums.majorgeeks.com/showthread.php?t=100874). Long story short, I ended up having to reformatt my main HD. When I did, I was able to see the slave drive in Windows Explorer and in the Disk MGMNT tool it says that the D: drive has an unknown Partition. I have Acronis Disk Director Suite 10. Can I expect this program to help me get the information off this drive. After I get the information I'll do a clean partition and place this 40GB HD. The program did not come with any manuals, so do I try to boot to the bad HD in order to run the Acronis Program? Can the Acronis program run and repair the partition from the Main (separate) HD? Thanks fro your help!

John

 

Update. I tried to use the Akron's Recovery Program and it states that there is a non-MS-DOS OS installed. Obviously this is in error because no other OS was EVER installed on this HD.

This HD had win98se installed prior to using it as a slave drive. I tried booting from the win98se disk and it states that there is a non-MS-DOS operating system installed. I tried booting from the Win XP Home disk and it will show that the HD has Partition (FAT32) and no unallocated space. I'm confused. With the old Windows Operating systems, you always had the option of installing windows and retaining the files from previous OS's. If the Win XP Home disk is reading the partition as being a FAT32 shouldn't I be able to upgrade/install Win XP and retain the files? Help!