BRL,
I am trying to follow what is going on. From your first post, it sounded like your primary hard drive on your computer failed. So now you need a new hard drive for your computer. Your friend then gives you an old hard drive he had so you could get up and running again.
After your second post, it sounds like you had your secondary hard drive go out on your computer and your friend gave you an old hard drive for you to use, but you cannot access it and you keep getting a boot failure when you have it in your comp.
Now I am trying to figure out what you want to do with it. I think you are saying that when you put this drive on your comp, the comp no longer boots, when you have the hard drive out of your comp, the computer does boot.
If you have two hard drives and one does boot into WinXP:
Take the new hard drive that your friend gave you and make it primary master with an optical drive as secondary master. (Leave your WinXP drive out at the moment.) Boot with the WinXP CD and go though the setup screen to the point where you setup the partition on the hard drive. Delete any partitions on there and create a new one. Then tell the Setup you are done and want to quit. Then take your WinXP hard drive and make it Primary Master, take your friend's hard drive and make it secondary master. (No optical drives at this time.) Then boot into windows and format your friend's drive in Windows. Now you should have two hard drives that can be accessed and only one that will boot. Now you can shut down and arrange your hard drives and optical drives any way you want on your IDE Channels.
If you gave us the details on all your drives we can give you the jumper settings for the drives to get them all working together.
Take Care,
Richard