I've just been given (haven't picked it up yet) a pc tower that won't boot up anymore. They know nothing about computers other than the power button so I'm hoping it won't be a huge problem. I think it has Win2k, but may run Win95se.

What I'd like to do somehow is use my IBM Thinkpad T20 running Win2k to control the hard drive in the tower. Maybe even use some of its prossessing capabilities. I don't know any specs on the tower yet so I can't fill you in.

Can this be done? Maybe I could pull the hd out of the tower and build a box to make it external? Did I just get a worthless paperweight?

Hi and welcome to GTG

what do you want to do exactly? you can't connect to the HDD remotely without an operating system intialised, hence you can't connect to a dead machine.
You can slave the drive locally to your machine through USB external storage drive casing.

You see the method of access depends on what you have available and how do you want to access it.

Please ask if you have any other question or if you have more details.

if you do get the other tower up and running you won't be able to cluster the processors without at least windows 2000 advanced server (i'm almost 100% sure that 2000 server cannot cluster...but i could be wwrong)

drat.

So maybe just yanking the hard drive out, somehow hooking it to usb, and building a fan cooled oak box might be my best bet. Darn those financial limitations.

thx