Since hdd's are both SATA, I tried simply plugging both in and windows was very slugglish. Took at least an hour to load. Old unbootable hdd showed up as "H." New hard drive showed as "C." Clicked on the old H drive and got I/O error; inaccessable.  
The drive itself is not physically damaged. It just crashed one day. On startup, WinXP tries to load but goes to blue screen for a quick second then attempts to restart again.  
Already bought a new hard drive (fully functional with WinXP) and i simply want to copy files from old hard drive to new one or burn to dvd+rw.  
Professtional data recovery services are too damn expensive.
If more info is needed and you think you can help email me at str8loco21@yahoo.com
Please HELP!!! thank you

try restorer 2000 pro

Why not boot from an Ubuntu CD? It should be able to mount both drives without any problem. I tried a really old version (6.10) and it didn't correctly mount a SATA drive, but the current release (8.04) was able to do this without any problem. At that point you should have read/write acces to both drives.

and if you have another computer. you could put both drives in it and then you can transfer files