I had a somewhat similar problem last week. Because of the failure of
a memory module, my disk got corrupted. The presence of the disk in
the system would prevent Windows XP from booting. I bought a new disk,
reinstalled XP and tried to use my original disk as a slave. That did
not help. I could not boot the system!

The next thing I tried is to put the old disk inside a Linux box with
NTFS kernel support. I was able to boot the Linux machine and mount
the 'bad' disk. I am now in the process of recovering all my files.

I realize you might not have a Linux box on hand and might not be able
to build a Linux kernel. I just wanted to pass my experience to
others.

Good luck.