Hi,
I've just spent the day grappling with this problem & eventually got around it. Here's how, for anybody who needs the info:
There can be a number of reasons for the 0x000000024 error, in my case the disk was corrupt, but there was no hardware problem.
This can be fixed with chkdsk, but XP just went ballistic anytime it tried to mount the drive, so the problem was finding a way to run chkdsk....
The solution was to add the drive to a system that had XP already installed (2000 would also work) but it
must be running on a
FAT partition. Go into safe mode on that machine and rename ntfs.sys to ntfs.old in the Windows\System\Drivers directory. This will stop ntfs from being enabled, and so stop the drive being mounted.
Now, shutdown, add your corrupt drive and boot up normally. You can probably see the new drive appear in Explorer to get the drive label (e.g. E

Now go to a command prompt and type:
chkdsk E: /f (or whatever the correct drive number is). Hopefully you'll see the errors being reported and fixed.
All going well you can then rename ntfs.old to ntfs.sys, and replace the drive in your original PC and get back to work. Take this chance to back up all your data though - if it happened once, it'll probably happen twice.
You can read more on this here:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;228888
Good luck,
Karl O'Brien.