I'm sure you will get other post and advice. I don't know of a cable where you can just use and capture your files. May be one. But sounds to me like you drive is bad or windows is totally corrupt now. If you have access to another computer you can remove your old drive and set the jumpers on it to slave. Then connect it to be a slave drive for the bootable computer you are using. The boot up and go to windows explorer and see if you old drive is listed and if so you can copy your files there. Once copied to the other computer you can try to format that old drive and if it will not format then the drive is bad. You can use your computer by buying a new drive and installing your OS and get it running. Then try the above to recover files off the old one. One other thing, a drive must spin to work so take the cover off the computer, put your hand on top the drive and boot the computer. You can feel the drive spinning if it in fact does. If no spin then your drive is bad and all I said above on recovering old files will not work. A drive must spin to read it.

dbramlet