how to read laptop hdd on my desktop pc?

Hi all , hope you can help

I have a laptop which was running on vista. It now says that it cannot find the OS on boot up. The HDD is SATA as is my desktop pc which runs on xp . I have connected up the laptop hdd to my pc's SATA port and it regognises that thier is a usb device their but cannot communicate with it.

Is a caddy my only option or is it posible to get drivers onto my pc which will enable my desktop to read it? :

My goal was to recover all of my data from it before atempting a reinstall.

Many thanks