Can I save my old HD to a new system???

My HP pavilion a867c with 550 Intel Pentium 4 with HT (3.40GHz), 1.0GB PC3200 DDR SDRAM, 250 GB SATA Hard Drive (7200RPM) crashed with a motherboard failure. Unfortunately, all my important financial and business data and email is on the hard drive with no way to retrieve it (I know, always back up data...lesson learned)...anyway, I purchased a Dell Inspiron 531 with AMD Athlon 64X2 Dual-Core 5600+, 3GB DDR2 SDRAM@667MHz, 500GB SATA Hard Drive (7200RPM) to get me by while trying to figure out what was wrong with the HP. Is it possible for me to make the HP 250 GB SATA Hard Drive a slave to the 500GB SATA Hard Drive on the DELL system without reformatting it so that I can retrieve my data??? I'm quite a novice, so as much information as possible would be helpful...thanks

Sorry didn't notice they were both SATA. Ignore the jumper settings (as most SATA drives do not have this option).
But make certain that the 500Gb drive is the Primary Boot HDD (should be in boot sequence within BIOS)If not there, check the HDD boot order (this needs to be done anyway)