HELP: plug bad 2000 drive into good 2000 system

[tc2003]

My home computer runs Windows 2000. Running the windows update to get all my security patches, one of the installations failed and now my system will not boot even to a mode that will let me get to the command line. Freaking microsoft...

Anyway, I'd like to take that drive, and plug it into a system at work that also runs Win2000 to see if I can salvage any of the data off of it.

I ned ot find out how to hook up the drive so that it tries to boot the Win2000 on the C: of hte work system, not the garbled crap on my drive from home. I'm not a hardware guy, so any help / tutorials would be great (master? slave? um...). Thanks

[Baser-X]

Hook it up as a slave on the same cable as the drive that is already in there. Since there is no reference to the OS on your home drive in your work boot.ini it should not recognize there is an OS on that drive at all. Get your data then take the home drive back home and format it. Most likely a simple format will fix the problem if it was just a screwed up install of an update. 99% of the time, failed installs of updates are due one or more bad files in your OS, it's probably not the drive itself. But just to be on the safe side, once you have recovered your data, do some disk checking to verify it's not the drive itself.

[tc2003]

Thanks, Baser-X -- just the info I was looking for!