two drives: one went retarded

Okay so here is my dilemma,

I have to hard drives, one became corrupted I assume (I am doing this for someone) and so it will no longer boot up. A new hard drive was purchased and it is set up as secondary master, and the old hard drive is set up as primary slave. Now if the second drive is not plugged in, I can boot up with the new hard drive with no problem. However if the secondary slave is plugged in then I get a message which states the secondary hard drive is corrupted and the system can not boot.

Now when i install them both as masters I can see both drives, and it will boot up but it says the corrupted one is not initialized which means I will have to reformat it, and that I don't want to do because there is data on there.

Can anyone think of ANYTHING I can do so i can access this drive?

PS

I am using Windows XP on this machine

 

Knoppex cd, apparently, will read off one drive and can aid copying to the other.
NFTS Reader, is a download from majorgeeks that will read nfts drives .
Have you tried FIXMBR on the old disc, from XP disc repair ?

 

No, I have not tried FIXMBR, however that is my next step. I appreciate the help, and will let you know how it goes.

 

Fot the knoppex cd

http://www.knoppix.org/-- english----http://www.knoppix.net/

To save you keep looking,
From my previous work on this sort of problem
NFTS RECOVERY
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/121517/EN-US/

NFTS BOOTSECTOR RECOVERY
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/153973/EN-US/

SCROLL DOWN PAGE FOR A LIST OF RECOVERY OPTIONS
http://shsc.info/DataRecovery

For others with similar problems, it is always helpful if you find a remedy from our suggestions, and which one worked for you.

 

okay tried these and now I get the following message when trying to start windows:

"Windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt: \WINDOWS\system32\config\SYSTEM"

 

Go to this link

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/307545/