Duracell is right: if you can't get access to the drive from dos, no other file recovery program will help.
To simplify your life, if you can get access to another computer, remove the other "test" computer's hard drive. Set up your faulty drive as primary master. You shouldn't need access to cdroms or dvdroms if you're using a bootable recovery floppy. With the other hard drive removed, there should be no panicked confusion about which disk(s) are detected.
Try to access the bios settings by pressing 'del' at the beginning of POST. On the first screen, see if your drive has been autodetected by the IDE configuration. If it's not seen (and you can't get the bios to auto-detect it) it's access is significant. If it cannot be found in bios, your bootable floppy may not detect it either -- because the drive motor isn't running (or some other very serious problem).
In bios settings, make sure that you set the floppy as the first boot device. Insert the floppy recovery program. You might want to ground yourself by touching the exposed metal of the interior of your case and then gently touching the exterior of the hard drive (is it emanating heat? Can you feel any motion? Are there any heavy clicks?). Run the diagnostic programs and see if your drive is detected. If it is, let the program run a full surface scan and correct any bad sectors it finds. Watch this closely -- if the diagnostic program begins to find numerous bad sectors at the beginning of the disk, and it seems to be finding them more and more, you may have an instance in which the diagnostic program itself is perpetuating the problem (pits in the aluminum disk, for instance). Stop the diagnostic program.
The good news if your diagnostic program finds the drive and checks its surface is that chances are at least some of your data may be recoverable. Set your drive as primary slave and boot it with a working primary Windows hard drive. If you have enough room on the working primary hdd, you might want to try to do a full copy of the faulty disk. With a 200 gig disk, that might not be an option, so save what absolutely needs to be saved.
Try running Check Disk from within windows and see if bad blocks can be eliminated. Note, if you're using a special pci adapter (like a scsi adapter or perhaps the ata100 adapter you mentioned) there are times when Windows hiccups on booting these adapters and it will register serious hard drive failures that are actually errors in the adapter. To eliminate this possibility, you may want to unscrew and then reseat the adapter. Then reboot (good scsi adapters tend to have built-in diagnostic apps in their bios).
If you find any bad sectors on your drive, plan on replacing it. Bad sectors don't go away and with time they will multiply.
Good luck.
