Major advice needed!!

Hey gang, now it's my turn to be in a mess.....found my computer off last night ...booted up and it gets past login screen and reboots ....tried safe mode ...loads to login and reboots .... tried a repair installation ...loads files, saves configuration, restarts....gets to log in screen, restarts.
Pulled the hhd's tried each seperately on the one that has the os ...the above happens, on the slave, set to master ...sees an old installation of xp and tries a repair ....same as above, except when it restarts it locks at the press any key to boot from disc....won't get past that.
Unfortunately, I tried to slave them to another computer (Compaq) and that one will not boot up with them slaved!!!
Do I have backups of my important stuff? NOOOO!!
Any suggestions, PLEASE!
Ram is OK, bios settings seem OK. Don't know what else to try, other than fresh install attempt ....as in get new hhd, install xp and slave the others to find and save my stuff.

 

Tried each hhd on the compaq's secondary channel (slave, master, cable select) and the system won't boot up with either in on that channel.....arrghhh.
Pulled the slave (seagate 40g) ran diagnostics off seagate utility cd and found serious errors on both partitions (had it check ram while I was at it - passed, as did the basic of the hhd ....file system was corrupt on both partitions, which I don't understand as I run defrags, ccleaner, avg, etc weekly). So only resort was to wipe drive, re-partition, try install new xp on the hhd. And hope that I can slave the old master and access my doc's and mail files.

 

Took my slave, wiped it clean (sob, sob ....had some old programs I can't retrieve - no cd), installed xp pro on it, installed avg, ad-aware, ccleaner and firefox (ad-aware found 14 items and the only place I went to, other than MS. welcome first use web site, was directly to MG's to get the downloads!!), and have now hooked up my old master ....running avg on it, then if it's clean, find my old mail files and transfer, and my doc's and transfer ...then will wipe that one. Sigh!!
Didn't even think of Koppix, damn!

 

It's just soooo strange .... recovered all my e-mail files and folders and address's, copied all my doc's to a new folder, ran a check disc on that hhd ...don't think it fixed anything .... now trying to recover my bookmarks in firefox ...all the programs and settings are still there ....haven't tried yet to see if they will run ... just don't have a clue as to what happened.

 

That is what is strange .... after a format on both drives, everything is working. Lost a lot of programs that I never use, so no big deal. Kept/recovered everything that was important .... never experienced this kind of error before and simply have no idea as to what caused it.....(maybe one of the ferrets stuck a nose into the case - as it's open with one of the hhd's hanging out - it's a mini hp without enough room for all that I've got running in it!!)