Hard Drive XP Boot Failure and Hang up

My Main Hard Drive is freezing at the boot screen and I was able to get it
into safe mode one time. Thinking I had an error I ran error checking and
waited. It ran (we know how long that takes) and no errors found, but it
reboots and gets hung again. Now, everytime I try and boot it into safe mode
or last good state it gets hung up. I have reinstalled xp on my secondary
hard drive and it's my new "c" and have a fairly recent back-up on my
external, but would still like to get into the drive and get some files.

I'm no computer wiz, but am comfortable installing hardware and playing with
some system settings, so I had an idea and connected the "freeze drive" as
the slave to see if I can have the new xp install "C master" hopefully
recognize "freeze" as "D", but xp doesn't like the operating system trying to
boot from the "freeze" and my new "C master" drive.

Any help or suggestions would be appreciated.