Old (crashed) Hard Disk crashes PC from USB Connection

My HD crashed my XP SP2 PC so I took it out, put it into a USB Caddy, plugged it in to my portable.

Now, when I power up the old drive it crashes the portable.

The portable gets rebooted and has to perform a disk check of the C: drive.

I need to read the data on the old drive, any ideas how I can safely do that?

tia,
Colin