Hard Drive Help

My PC crashed. To make a long story short my old WD IDE hard drive is not functioning and when placed on the IDE cable as master, slave, or cable select it won’t allow my computer to boot. I have changed the bios settings on the new mother board for the sectors, etc… I have tried with a new hard drive and on a secondary IDE. The computer doesn’t recognize the secondary. The good news I backed up important info, the bad news; that cd is corrupted and I can’t get to the info so I need to get info off of my HD. Please help. Be gentle I have enough knowledge to be fairly dangerous.