Trouble assigning drive letter

This problem may not be as easy as it sounds:

I just reformatted my computer and reinstalled xp home, I was running xp pro before, but it was an illegal copy and wanted my original oem back.

I have 2 hard drives, one is my C: drive and the other is a storage disk. There is no OS on it and I do not intend to have an OS on it. It's just a storage drive. This drive was working properly before I formatted.

Now, when I go into Disk Management, I get Disk 0 being labeled as Basic and as my C: drive

Disk 1 however is labeled as Dynamic Foreign and I cannot select anything to the right of this box...the box that is supposed to tell me the drive letter and if it's healthy or not.

When I right click on it and asks if I want to convert it to a basic disk, but I will lose all data on it. I cannot lose the data that is on this disk. I cannot find a function to initialize this disk either, and assign a new drive letter is greyed out.

BIOS recognizes this disk, but I don't know what else I can do in BIOS.

All jumper settings and such should be good to go since it was working properly before the format and I didnt physically remove or alter the hard drive in anyway.

What can I do to make windows recognize this drive and retrieve all the information on it?

This thread has lots of relevant info: http://www.eggheadcafe.com/software/aspnet/32587115/dynamic-disk-is-not-acces.aspx