It seems my WD 120GB that contained my OS and all applications failed on me. I booted up, heard a click of the drive powering down, then it did it three more times in a row. Now the drive shows in the BIOS as LRG, PIO 0, 8455MB on boot. I could not access the drive at all using the recovery console from the XP disc, and now that I have put a new drive in with Windows installed I cannot see the old drive in Windows.

Also if the drive is hooked up then at the point in the BIOS where it is "Detecting IDE..." it goes horribly slow. Boot-up overall goes pretty slow if that drive is hooked up.

I really do not want to lose what is on it. Apps I can reinstall, and I am thinking the main thing I'm worried about is my Outlook personal file folders. I have them backed up as of early July, but all my email since then will be forever lost if I can't recover anything.

How can I go about trying to recover what is on that drive?

Did yo do a CMOS-reset as advised in the other forum?
Put that HD in another PC, run the WD test-utility as found in the Sticky at the top of this forum.
Programs like HDD-Regenerator from www.dposoft.com could bring your HD back to life.
I've used it successfully on different HDs and other members of this illustrious Techspot can confirm its power. That is no guarantee that it works on your HD as well, but worth a shot.

I'll certainly give it a shot, anything to recover some data. I didn't try resetting the CMOS at all, I wasn't sure if that's a cause or not. I took the hard drive to my friend's house and we plugged it in to his computer and the boot sequence was unbearably slow on there as well.

try get a easy recovery pro 6. that should recover your hd data :grinthumb