Hello,
The boot drive appears to have failed. The COMPUTER won't boot from the Windows 2000 setup disk; in recovery console the dir command ERRORS out and chkdsk gets to 25% and then SAYS most of disk appears unusable.

My second hard drive has a backups partition and also fairly recent images of the boot drive and programs partition, made with Norton ghost. I assume that the data on the second disk is intact but is there a way to get at it? What happens if I go thru a new windows 2000 installation hoping there is enough healthy disk left on the bad hdd--will I be able to see the drives on the second hard drive, or will the file system essentially be washed out by the fresh installation? Similarly, is it possible to replace the bad disk, do a fresh windows installation and then access data on the second disk?I'd replace the bad HDD and put the 2nd HDD into a known working machine with a burner and grab your most recent Ghost image and burn it to a bootable CD. Then boot to your machine and restore the new HDD to the Ghost image...

After all is running correctly then replace the storage HDD and all your data should be accessible.

Hard drives aren't a GOOD spot for storing IMPORTANT data...they all fail, eventually.