If the problem is with Windows loading up, then yes, you can set the jumper on the back of the hard drive to Slave, attach the hard drive internally, to the middle connector on the ribbon pin, and the drive should just show up in your computer. I've done this before. I did it a couple times with hard drives out of machines that wouldn't boot up, and it worked, mostly. I've done it plenty of times with drives that were fine, just old, without any problems.
The reason I had to do it with the drives that wouldn't boot up was that the drives were dying, so a few files here and there were corrupt. So I didn't get all my files back, a few mp3s, a couple text files, whatever. The drives wouldn't boot up only because some of the Windows files were corrupt. Not the fault of Windows, purely the result of running the computer/drive 24/7 for 4 years.
Eventually, I purchased one of
these, because I just had so many old hard drives around. The drives still work, but they're not that big, and I filled them up really fast, so I just removed them, and keep them in storage.
