When attempting to install Empire at War I managed to muck up my computer. (Not this one obviously, it's my parent's) Anyhow, it seems to have happened when I tried to install DirectX 9. I had to restart and when I did, all I got was the "Start in Safe Mode?" screen, which only brought me right back to the same screen. I tried to go through system setup and system recover (F1 and F10 at the blue HP startup screen IIRC) but setup got me nowhere.
System recovery (which is hardwired into the hard drive) however, brought me to a screen saying that a particular .dll file was missing or corrupt.
Here's my question. Presuming that tech support can't fix the problem without wiping my harddrive, is there a way for me to recover some or all of the data that has not been backed up? (Yeah, I know. I should know better. No lectures please.

)
What I was thinking was, if I can hook my hard drive up to my parents computer, I can use their hard drive to start up mine and recover the data to theirs, or a perhaps to an external hard drive.
Is that even possible? Is there some other way that might work better?
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