xp crash

[hotpotato71]

need help again. a colleague of mine risks losing several years' photo files after his windows xp crashed inexplicably wednesday. the pc would show the windows xp splash screen, but then go to a screen displaying boot options. no matter what option we chose (from safe mode to last known good configuration to start windows normally), the pc would 'continue' booting, then flash what appears to be a blue screen (it was so fast we could not see the message), then reset.
we had our technicians check it. apparently, the pc could not see the system disk c, though it detected slave disk d.
i asked my colleague what his last action was before the pc crashed. he said he was 'capturing' a video to drive d (he runs a video-photo business) when the pc locked up. the next thing he knew, he could not even get it to restart.
here are the specs of his pc: pentium 4 (afaik more than 1ghz), 512mb ram, one hard drive set up as master, one hard drive set as slave. it runs on winxp (service pack 2 installed). funny thing is, it is maintained every week. that means scanning the disk for errors, defragmenting it, and running and updating norton antivirus. i also installed sygate firewall 5 and spybot search and destroy (also updated) on it.
it uses mozilla firefox 1 as default browser, though my colleague prefers to use ie6 sometimes.
when i asked him what hardware he used before the pc crashed, he said he connected a 'lacie' external cd-dvd burner via usb. but i've seen him use it before, without side effects.

here's the rub. i cannot recommend that he reconfigure the slave drive as the new drive c, and reinstall windows from scratch. drive d holds his important data, including captured videos and photos of our boss. is there any way we could get windows running again, without having to sacrifice his data on drive d? any input will be really appreciated
microsoft has a funny way of greeting us during the holidays, doesn't it?

[Poseidon]

Couple of things to try:

Disconnect the slave drive to preserve the data from accidental deletion.

Using the XP cd, boot into the Recovery Console and run chkdsk with the /r parameter.
Depending on the damaged / recovered files, if you still can not boot into windows, then try a Repair Install - (scroll down to method 2)

[hotpotato71]

thanks poseidon. problem is, i don't have access to the winxp cd. sorry i forgot to mention that. but so far, we managed to boot the pc by making the drive c a slave (so now it's drive d), and using another hard drive as master (also runs on win xp). the problem is this:
the user name of the master and slave drives are the same (rocky), and the files we are trying to access are from the old disk's desktop. that means the files' path will be something like: documents and settings --> rocky --> desktop. but the desktop folder in the slave drive is not accessible, so we still cannot retrieve the needed files. would there be a way to make the desktop folder on drive d accessible? thanks very much.

[Rifleman @ Layman's PC]

>>>How to take ownership of a file or folder in Windows XP<<<

thanks poseidon. problem is, i don't have access to the winxp cd. sorry i forgot to mention that. but so far, we managed to boot the pc by making the drive c a slave (so now it's drive d), and using another hard drive as master (also runs on win xp). the problem is this:
the user name of the master and slave drives are the same (rocky), and the files we are trying to access are from the old disk's desktop. that means the files' path will be something like: documents and settings --> rocky --> desktop. but the desktop folder in the slave drive is not accessible, so we still cannot retrieve the needed files. would there be a way to make the desktop folder on drive d accessible? thanks very much.