Hard Drive Crash

I have a Maxtor 160GB hard drive that has crashed and won't boot up. So I figured I would put in another hard drive and load up XP on it to boot and make my old hard drive a slave. After booting up, the old drive shows in My Computer, but Windows tells me it has not been formatted yet. I don't want to formate this drive because it has data I need. How do I get this data off the old hard drive and onto my other drive or a CDROM?

If Windows says the drive is not formatted, that's generally a Bad Thing. You may be able to recover the ability to access the disk by booting up into the Recovery Console, from your Windows XP CDROM.

After starting Recovery Console, try the FIXMBR command, but be sure to read this help first, or you may affect the wrong hard drive:

http://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/windows/xp/all/proddocs/en-us/bootcons_fixmbr.mspx

Check out the info on the FIXBOOT command (also on the page referenced above), but try FIXMBR first and see if the drive will boot. If neither of those tools enables you to access the drive, there are a variety of software packages and service bureaus that may help you recover some or all of the data on the drive. Do a search for "data recovery" and you'll find a bunch to choose from.