Hi gadgetboy98 welcome to PCHF Your not an idiot everyone has to start some where and the team at PCHF are glad to help. The best thing and easiest way is to slave the drive in another PC but make sure the AV is up to date and do a full scan on the drive to make sure it's clean before recovering any data. Or the other option would be to try get the old PC going again and back the data up to a pen drive or DVD's/ CD's. What would you like to try?

Thanks madmatt2006 for your response. It seems that the only option left to me is the hookup to good pc. I have tried every boot disk and recovery that I can find on the net. When I first lost the data on the old quantum 3.5, scandisk reported the drive to still be good. I put a bogus command in bootcfg and now no dos menu or A prompt. nothing but a blank screen. Even though the pc is old it worked good until I thought I was a computer guy. The corrupted HD has a jumper on cs with a ribbon connection. On the good pc the xp HD is not connected to a ribbon. The wires on the xp HD are marked as P3. There is another P3 hookup not connected. The motherboard on the xp has IDE one and two. IDE one has a blue cable connected to the HD. I do not have another cable that looks like that one. I am not at all confident on correct hookup or what to do when booting up with corrupt Hd connected to good pc. I am very grateful for any help and I know any mistakes will be mine.

What did you input?

Thanks Chris for your response. bootcfg/redirect to A drive. When I did this it come up on the screen that I would no longer be able to see the dos menu if I continued. I continued! Call me Jethro or I like crayons or something........

Hint and a half there. :P

On the computer you hook it up to, run the following on the drive in question:

fixmbr
fixboot

Hey gadget not sure if this will help but what did you set in first boot order in BIOS/Setup?

This may help:Bootdisk.Com