Thought i'd get some help before I take the desktop to a local shop. I am terrible at computer hardware.

1. XP crashes half way during load
2. Bios only detects one HD (says IDE but I am S-ATA?) partition, it's in the master 5 slot.
3. There is no slave?
4. It happened shortly after I opened my computer to replug in an internal card reader. I smelled a little burning plastic after plugging it back in but the system booted up just fine, ran for 15-20 minutes before crashing/rebooting.
5. I have a really, really compact shuttle case/motherboard so it's HOT

This happened before, I took it to the shop and the guy took out my old hard drive, placed it in an external drive to 'save' my data but he still lots my desktop/my documents folder. Is there a way to save this, I don't want to spend $ on another external drive.