In the Administrative Tools applet where you sound like you've been, you can attempt to assign a drive letter to the drive, since it's apparently been detected. However, if the crash has caused the drive to need formatting, you're in trouble. If that's the case, I hope you have a backup of any data you didn't want to lose.
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When you've gotten your system back like you want it, I urge you to get yourself an external hard drive and a good 3rd party backup program. You can set it up to do everything automagically at the time and frequency of your choice. 1 TB external hard drives are about $70 these days and a really good FREE backup program is the Easeus Todo Backup Free which you can download from
http://www.todo-backup.com/products/home/free-backup-software.htm . That can save you a lot of time and frustration the next time something like this happens. Sooner or later it happens to all computers for one reason or another.
Good luck.
Hello - I have a laptop that crashed over the weekend. I need to do a restore on the computer but before I do I need to get the documents and pictures off of the drive. I've taken the drive out of the laptop and plugged it into my Windows 7 desktop using an external USB bay. I hear the computer detect the drive but it will never show up as a drive. If I look in Computer Management it shows up in there. Can anyone tell me the best way to get the data off please? Thank you

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