I have recently installed a new hard drive in my computer, I was trying to transfer some files to it and I think I may have deleted something important from the old hard drive, as it now seems unable to boot from that drive. I have switched the new hard drive to master, and reinstalled XP on that, with the old drive running as slave.

I can boot the computer from the new drive, and see the old drive under my computer, it still has all the files on it, and all are accessible. I can get to the program files on the old drive, but they won't run, because they aren't installed on the new version of XP I am now running on.

Is there any way of transferring these programs such that they will run from the new XP on the new hard drive?

Welcome to PCHF

You will need to re-install all of the programs as they need registry entries to run properly. All other files should be no problem.

There are two options. If you have installed exactly the same Windows etc. then you can copy your whole Program Files and Documents and Settings from your old harddisk to your new. Then you boot from your old harddisk and make a backup from your registry. Then you boot on your new harddisk, make a backup from that registry and then load the registry of your old harddisk into the new one. The chance that this works is not great. If a program has installed a few files in, let's say, the Windows map, then it will not work.

As Hengis said: the best way to be sure that the programs will work is to reinstall them on your new harddisk...