xp cant find my other hard drive!!!

hey guys i was wondering if anyone has had this problem before, or if anyone knows how to fix this problem. you see, i reformated my hard drive, and now xp cant seem to find my second hard drive. whats weird is that i went into the device manager and checked to see if it was there, and it was, but its not appearing in "my computer" and there is no way to access it. also if anyone can tell me, is there any way for me to get this back without having to reformat the drive? its full of stuff i dont want to lose. and if anyone is wondering, yes i did go through the trouble shooting section that windows provides.

 

Check the FAT format of the drive you just formatted. Is the new Windows installation on a FAT32 table while the other drive is NTFS?

 

if you go into control panel and go to Administrative Tools then computer management then disk management and check the drive is healthy and activeated

 

If you plugged in your 2nd HD after formatting and reinstaling your OS drive than you need to open the Disk Management utility, and it will write a drive signature and assign a drive letter. Most likely.

So, right click on my computer, select Manage. Then select Disk Management from the list to see.

 

ok i'm there, (i know its been a while since i posted this and its a reeeeeally late reply but please bear with me) i tried it at a friends house and it worked but we did an extra step, a step which we forgot saddly, and when i took it to my house, we couldnt remember what we did. see when i go to the disk manager, there are only 3 options that show up when i right click it. its "convert disk to basic" "Properties" and "Help" and i'm not going to convert it to basic cause that will make me lose everything on it. is there something i was supposed to do that wasnt mentioned? any help would be appreicated...