Recovering lost data

Hello,
My XP mother board was trashed after lightening hit it. I bought a new Vista. I took the hard drive out of the XP and installed it into the Vista as a slave drive. The Vista recognizes it as F drive. When I try to get info from the XP, it gives me things on the Vista. I am trying to recover some addresses that I had in my address book on the XP (not e-mail addresses) just regular name and addresses. I will never be able to replace them. It gave me some of them in the Vista in contacts, but not all of them. When I go into a file on the XP it tells me it is empty. Almost evey file I try to go into it states it is empty.
I am not very familar with computers, though I did install the slave hard drive and programmed it. Maybe thats the problem :-)
I would certainly appreciate all the info anyone can give me.