I think he did the window's repair already.
Personlly, I'd go with the 2nd hard drive. I've had boot issues with 2000 and xp and when it gets this bad, I slave the drive to another and try to pull the data I want. After that I do a complete fresh install. XP is by far the best OS from MS (and pretty good overall), but it still has problems.

jr

"What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence." C Hitchens