I hardly have enough information to say why you can't boot without failsafe. In general if failsafe works and normal booting does not, you need to determine what "cheat codes" you need to get Knoppix to boot properly. The nature of the boot failure and what you are doing differently in failsafe would be helpful. I suggest reading the cheat codes text file that comes with a torrent download, and or read the wiki section on cheat codes.

I'm not clear on what you think you are doing transferring files to the new drive. Can Knoppix even see the files on the old drive? How is the new drive formatted? If it's NTFS I very strongly suggest that you do not write to it at all with Knoppix.

In general I suggest that people do file recovery with Knoppix by installing a FTP server to another computer, then transfer the files (assuming that they can open the old drive partition)s) with Knoppix using Konquror as the FTP client across a network. In your case, since you seem to have a new and empty drive, I would suggest first trying installing Windows back on the new drive, then install the old drive and see if Windows can open the old drive and copy the files over to the new drive. Obviously you now have found that Windows can't safely maintain a NTFS partition either, but it has a better chance at it than Knoppix. If yYour new Windows install can't open the old drive partitions then you might need to fall back to my transfer across a network suggestion.