I have a computer running on windows XP and I took out the hard drive,
I then installed different hard drive that has windows 2000 after setup recognizes it it WIL start to boot but about after 10 SECONDS STOPS. Is there anyway of seeing what is on this drive?  I even put the XP setup disk in cd rom but it will not read goes DIRECTLY to hard drive and tries to load windows 2000 and I have set the boot order in setup to read the cd rom first.  If I can never see the files will I need a program running off the floppy drive to gain access to the hard drive such as reformat?

John Replace the XP drive by itself...
Re-boot a few times til it works normal.
Then hook up the Win2K drive as a slave by setting the jumpers correctly on the back of the drive...
Re-boot.
It should boot to XP and the Win2K drive should show up in WIN Explorer...If you want to run Win2k, you'll have to do a Repair Install (if there was one with Win2k?) if the hard disk came out of a different machine.  If you only want to see what's on the drive, then do as Patio suggests, just don't expect the Win2k hard drive to boot, until you repair or reinstall.I got it to work with both drives in the same machine.

I will leave them both in the machine.

John