hard drive not booting up- need data!

[AAman]

my main drive (120g WD) wouldn't boot up yesterday, so I slaved it with another drive,

windows xp
will get to the flash screen, and either hang, or try to run disk check on the first
partition of the old drive (I said yes the first time and it started deleting every file on the partition)

It is listed when the computer boots up, everything seems fine until the xp flash screen--
then it clicks and makes a spinning sound, about every 10-30 seconds. All I want is the data,
I literally can't live without it!!! I can toss the drive even.

I can boot to a c: prompt on the other drive, but can't see the old drive!

this is urgent, I just spent the last few weeks transferring all my data from old drives,
projects, etc., to this one- was going to run backups today and it went out!

 

[fredtam]

Put it in a plastic bag and put it in the freezer for a couple hours. Take it ou and try again.

 

[AAman]

just tried the freezer, no change, exact same behavior, although after letting it sit for 20 minutes
at the boot screen, it seemed to get into xp, you could see the toolbar and a little bit, but the
rest of the screen was black, and moving the mouse just made a lot of beeps-

is there a program or something to try in dos? can't get into safe mode.

thanks

 

[fredtam]

I'm a bit confused. Your old boot drive bit the dust so you now have it set as a slave. I assume you have XP on the good drive right?

 

[AAman]

yes, xp on the good drive, but if the old drive is hooked up as slave, it doesn't want to boot into windows

the old drive gives a 'disk read error reboot' message if I use it as the main drive.

tried sticking it in a usb external drive and turning it on after bootup,

but that just slows down/freezes xp

 

[fredtam]

Guide may have some ideas. I had another one but cleared all my bookmarks recently.