Anyone have some tips on getting this drive to boot while not loosing the data?

Trying FDISK and Recovery console now.

Run it as a secondary drive and use RecoverMyFiles (software)

About to pull it out and do that.

Set other partition active, no change.

This sucks.

Been there

from recovery console.

fixboot and fixmbr and see what happens. Other than that, like said above, mount as a secondary drive in another system and run some recovery software or see if you can access the drive.

Few things jump to my mind...

1) Recovery software...I have used SpinRite personally...great piece of software but of course it costs $$...Downside is that if there are issues w/your HDD it will take a long time to run. My uncle's PC died during tax season(he runs his own accounting business at night) and SpinRite saved the day...took a week to fully recover all his data though. Yes, that is a week with the PC turned on and it doing it's own thing. It had some serious sector issues.

2) Try a bootable "Live-CD." I've used them in the past to see the HDD and access it to grab important files when there has been a disk / partition failure; however, if the disk is fully dead there probably isn't much that can be done. If it's dead the platters will stop spinning and thus you won't be able to access anything anywhere on the drive.

Hope this helped and that you can recover what you need!