Lost Harddrive

I’m running XP as OS, have a MAXTOR(40GB) as primary master,WD(80GB) as secondary master, which was partioned into 2 drives(WD),worked fine until recently when I formatted the primary master (no changes were made to the secondary drive).Now I can see the secondary drive in BIOS and Computer Management (shows the drive as health) but can’t see the contents in Explorer. File System on both drives are NTFS. It appears that the data is still intact but I do not want to use data recovery tools as itmight do more harm than good