Extracting XP Drives Information

The final edition of Windows XP Home on a computer that now has two drives only (C:\ & D;\).

This computer sometimes does not recognise these two drives and asks for a boot disc that does not exist.

Consulting the BIOS only the two laser drives are recognised.

Swapping the drive connections does sometimes provide a (temporary)  cure for this problem.

Question:

If the drives were in an external caddy is it possible to extract the files using computers having Vista or Windows 7..