When I needed to upgrade the SATA drive in my laptop, I bought a USB to SATA adapter and connected the new hard drive to that and copied the existing drive onto the new one before swapping drives.
Since your XP system will not boot, you will need to either install the drive in a functioning system, or use an external solution like the one I mentioned.
If your drive is unbootable, it is quite possible that there is some physical damage or damage to the file structure.
You should be able to copy simple media files, but I would not count on being able to recover program files.