Here's a suggestion...

1 install Knoppix to hard drive, overwriting your new XP install. Or alternately, you could simply reformat the boot drive to some filesystem Linux can safely write to--reiserfs, ext2, FAT32.

2 Copy data from the inaccessible NTFS partition to Knoppix install or reformatted boot disk. Even though Knoppix will not be able to safely write to NTFS, it will read it fine.

3 Reformat second disk FAT32 under Knoppix. As FAT32 has no built-in file permissions (unlike ext2/3, reiserfs, and NTFS), the disk should not be a "foreign disk" to XP Home.

4 Re-install XP Home.

5 Copy data from FAT32 disk to your new XP install.

6 If you want, then reformat the disk NTFS.

If you have access to a USB, firewire, or networked external disk that your XP install will read, you could simply copy data to it with Knoppix, then reformat the second disk to NTFS under XP or FAT32 under Knoppix, and go on from there.

By the way, Linux or Windows 98 (or FreeDOS) will probably be able to format your entire 250GB disk as one FAT32 partition--and XP should be then able to read and write it. Windows 2000 and XP cannot format a FAT32 partition over about 32GB. So if file security isn't as important as portability, you may want to just leave the disk FAT32. That way this wouldn't happen in the future, and your data would still be accessible read/write if you wanted to migrate to Linux for real.