Recover Files from a failed hard drive

The Drive is formated with NTFS and when trying to load WinXP Pro from Master drive or as a secondary drive with a master runnig a good copy of XP Pro it restarts pc as it accesses the drive each time. It will boot to the XP startup menu but reboots after you choose how to start, (Safe mode or normal mode) etc. How can I recover the files in My documents from this drive.