this master hard drive works fine - just limited as to what I can do.
I've been operating on my master hard drive ever since the crash - trying to figure out what happened (beyind obsolesence) - my system hard drive will not boot in the startup mode.
I'm confused by your references to a 'Master hard drive' and a 'system hard drive' - are they physically different drives, or partitions on the same drive?
You say you
can boot, but not to the drive you want, yes? It could be that the system on the non-booting drive has gotten damaged and needs to be clean-installed [or drag-copied from the booting drive].
Can you boot to a system CD?