Thanks for the reply. Yes, I was looking at the slave drive ... typo on my part calling it the c: drive as it was the g: drive in my case. I was able to back up the "documents and settings" directory. After I did a chkdsk in dos (everything was fine) I was now able to see the slave drive in windows explorer ... very odd. So I tried the repair disk again with the slave drive now the primary drive and it saw the OS. Downloaded all the files ok. Restarted without the bootable CD and got a password error message related to the lsass.exe file. It was late and I should have researched this error message some but instead in my lack of infinite wisdom I tried a fixboot and fixmbr from the recovery console ... big mistake. At that point I could see nothing on the disk either from the repair CD or as a slave drive in my other computer so I did a full install from the bootable CD.
A couple helpful hints here doing the full install for anyone reading this: 1) make sure you use a XP SP2 bootable CD if you have a large HD (I think over 130Gig) or it won't be able to partition or format the whole HD; 2) Make sure you select and partition the HD before doing the install even if you only want a single partition. I didn't do it at first thinking I only wanted a single partition so I shouldn't have to do it but trying to start windows after the files where copied from the CD caused the computer to continually restart itself and never boot into windows. Doing the partition first solved the problem.
If anyone has got this far you can hear my little rant on Microsoft. After the install, Internet Explorer would run for a minute, go out to the MSN website, and then proceed to crash. I had no access to the internet through Explorer so I couldn't even download another browser ... lol. I ended up going through the Windows update system and forcing an update to Explore 8 and then it worked ok. I immediately downloaded Google Chrome ... lol.