hard drive refuses to boot

Hi
While using software d/loaded to my Maxtor 20 gb HD
for the first time , my system crashed and I had to reboot.
Now after the windows 98 flash screen comes on the
system just hangs. I immediately removed the drive
and booted up with another freshly reformatted drive
running win 98 se. I am afraid to tinker with it before
being fully apprised of the possible danger involved
for fair of loosing my data.

Questions:
1) If I have been hit by a virus which has affected
the boot sector etc. What procedure should I follow
to remove it?

2) Will attaching the affected drive to my system as
a secondary master drive to view if my files are still
there harm it in any way

3) I have heard it is better to copy the entire affected
drive to a larger hd and work on the copy instead.
How is this done. The newly installed and formatted
drive is a Maxtor 80Gb.

Paul