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Okay, bad RAM had caused my Windows XP to corrupt, and I haven't gotten an external hard drive yet, so I couldn't do the suggested weekly backup. Therefore, I have about a year of files that are crucial to keep, along with everything else. When I mean crucial, I mean I NEED a way to back up my files from this hard drive without the use of an external HDD or new internal HDD, or a repair install of Windows XP. I may be able to set an IDE hard drive to slave, but I can't risk the loss of files with a repair install of Windows.

Put it into another computer is the best choice and slave it =\

I agree with darklord best to slave it in another PC then recover your data.

The HDD I need to back up is SATA and I have no other computers with SATA ports besides my build which isn't done. The drive I was considering slaving was to be on the IDE port of that computer as a slave to its DVD drive, because that's going to be in an external enclosure but I haven't received my RMA IDE drive and the enclosure is out of stock.

Then you can't do anything else but wait for another drive to use

Well, is the chance that a repair installation of Windows damaging my files small enough that I should not worry too much about it, or is it something 10% or above where I really should make sure I have my files backed up?

Usually, it'll leave the files intact. I know when I did a repair install, only thing missing were installed drivers and all the windows updates, but as far as I could tell, my files were perfectly fine