I have used a Live Linux CD to access and recover a number of HDD's data in the last few months. Mepis and Slax are good, they run from the CD. You place the CD in your CD drive and reboot. If all the hardware is found, 9 times out of 10 it will see the files on the hard drive (NTFS or Fat32). XP/2000 is a little bit of a pain, but it is still possible to recover data. Since you have a 2nd HDD all you would have to do is copy the files you want to the 2nd drive, then nuke in pave the original HDD. The Linux interface is a GUI, so if you can use Win. you can use these versions of Linux.

Can you here the drive spinning up? And when you plug the drive in what is the error, i.e.. "No OS Found", "Invalid System Disk",etc, or does the system just try to start then reboot?

My niece had some kind of hatred for Linux, didn't want it around her system, yada yada......until she trashed her system and didn't have any backups....I saved around 89% of her files, so now I don't get yelled at to much any more! This is just a thought..............