hard disk crash ??? can i save my data

If your OS is on the 80GB drive and your system boots fine if it is the only drive in the system and then you add the 250GB drive to the system and it hangs you might have a problem with the 250GB drive but it may not be totally dead. It sounds like it is spinning since BIOS sees it. How long did you let it sit before turning it off? Your OS might be trying to run a "check disk" on that drive. You could try to install the drive in an external enclosure and that might work or it might not depending on what might be wrong with the drive. If its got bad sectors and that all then you might be able to recover some or most of the data off it.

You might also be able to try a program like "Spinrite" (google it) and recover data off bad sectors if this is indeed your problem. If you do have sector problem and spinrite can fix some or most of them you would want to get the data off that drive ASAP. I like to even image it if possible to go as fast as possible. Ghost has a command to ignore bad sectors too.

Also you can run "seatools" (google that too) to look at the drive and see what it says. I would probably run seatools first to see if it passes.

Jumpers?

Boot order?

Really good idea to look at those issues.
If they are not the issue then grab a copy of SpinRite 6.0 from www.grc.com ...best software recovery ever made and does the same basic job as the $2-4K recovery companies.

Well, I know from my own experience that XP can sometimes be finicky when you add a second HDD to your system, Especially if you have XP installed on the 250GB drive. Do you have XP installed on that drive, or is it just data? One thing you could try is searchng for a program called "Bart PE". You will need your original XP disk. With this program, you can create a bootable CD that allows you to access files off of your drive. You could try installing the 250GB drive (and a ext USB drive) and running the program. Hopefully it will see both drives and you can run one of the apps that works like "My Computer" to transfer the data to the ext. drive (or the 80GB drive if you don't have much data). Then download a program called "Kill Disk" that will allow you to make a bootable floppy, which will zero out your drive. THEN, install the 250GB drive and go into XP's Disk Management utility to partition and format the drive. Another option is to download the latest version of Ubuntu and run that off the bootable cd you can make. It works great with NTFS drives. Try the aforementioned transfer and zero fill. Good Luck!

The drive in question is SATA ,I dont think boot order matters as my system boots and hangs wheen windows is loading

Are -both- drives SATA?
Does the 2nd drive have a copy of the OS or was it formated as a boot drive?

yes Both of them are SATA

No It does not have any OS ,It was used opnly for data storage purpose

to make it clear
80 GB SATA-> has the OS ,windows XP SP2
250GB SATA -> Only for data storage

everything was fine few days ago...this problem cropped up suddenly

Does the PC boot OK with only the OS (80Gig) drive connected?

Is there a message/text on the bottom of the screen when the "black screen moving bar" is shown? If so this is the Windows boot stub searching for the main NT loader?

How long did you let it sit before you powered off (or whatever you did)? If the D: drive has bad sectors and the OS cant read it, it might hang or eventually time out, or even run disk check. I personally would not let it run a disk check, at least not until you have tried to copy data off of it.

Get seatools and run it on the 250gb drive. If seatools starts finding bad sectors kill it and run spinrite on the drive.

GOT MY DATA !!!!!!!!!
what a relief ,i got all my data i did the following things ..
there is a version of windows available on net which allows you to boot from USB i downloaded that and retrieved my data.
That done , i ran spinrite on my drive in question it showed me drive overflow error .I have no idea why it is giving that .also windows check disk showed 4KB of bad sectors.please help me what i should do ? ..Is there software based solution or should i get it replaced as it is still in warranty

Run seatools from seagate (even if your drive is not seagate) if it has ANY bad sectors you need to replace it.