My old hard drive went haywire and I ended up with a dual install of xp and xp professional. I bought and installed a new hard drive but I want some files off my old hard drive. Obviously it was an internal drive. I am not savvy on the inner workings that go on in the tower - if I take my old hard drive somewhere, can they hook it up and pull out what I want?

Depends how old is the hard drive
It it is banged up then probably no. This depends on your definition of "haywire" does it mean result in bad sector reading , like loading error? or it fried itself, caught on fire?

Yeah. The answer is maybe.

When my old computer died and I got another I was able to hook up my old drive to the new system pretty easily. I lost some files, but also got some back. And I'm absolutely not the smartest guy in the room about computers. Just did a little bit of research online... didn't take long at all.

My old hard drive went haywire and I ended up with a dual install of xp and xp professional. I bought and installed a new hard drive but I want some files off my old hard drive. Obviously it was an internal drive. I am not savvy on the inner workings that go on in the tower - if I take my old hard drive somewhere, can they hook it up and pull out what I want?

You can probably take to a Best Buy (geek squad) or similar. They canm hook it up and copy any files you want onto a CD. Probably cost you about $100.

Or you can temporarily hook it up as a secondary slave in your PC and do this yourself.