Help with second hard drive in Vista

Hello all,

I recently had a pretty bad windows crash in XP and decided to just wipe my main hard drive and install a fresh copy of vista instead. Prior to installing I copied all of my data (music, homework files, ets) onto my second hard drive for safekeeping.

I wiped the first hard drive clean and put vista on without an issue. But now the seond drive isn't visible. I did some research and found that you can go into the disk management and disignate to windows that the installed device is a hard drive. But it wants me to format! I can't do that! My entire life is trapped on this second hard drive.

Does anyone know any sneaky tricks to get Vista to just accept my second drive as is so that five years of school work isn't lost?

I am running Vista Home Basic on an AMD Phenom quadcore 2.6gig processor with 2gigs of RAM. The hard drives are: (windows drive - Western Digital 250gig SATA) second drive (Western Digital 500gig SATA) <----this is the one I am trying very much not to format.

Thanks for any help. I can provide more info if needed.