Transferring data from an old laptop HD?

Question

Hello internet. I have a kind of tech-y problem.

To begin with, I'm trying to transfer a big hunk of data from some old laptop hard drives.

My brother and I both had a pair of crap Toshiba laptops, circa 2005 or so. By now, they're both trashed. BUT, the hard drives have been salvaged. I know enough to hook them up to this current Desktop, thankfully. Both use XP Home Edition SP2, as does this desktop.

Anyways, if I boot from the desktop, it denies me access. "F:\Documents and Settings\Owner is not accessible. Access is denied." is the message I get. I CAN access the Program Files, but I also want to access the Owner file. So, I tried booting from the hard drive itself. Login screen, put in password, blah-blah, but it wants me to re-activate Windows.

Obviously I don't want to pay to activate hard drives I'm only going to strip the data from. There's an option to start IE for some help, which I select, and I can then type "C:\" in the address bar, and it boots Explorer for about 45 seconds, before it just closes out.(Explorer, not IE. I can re-do this indefinitely as far as I know.) Keeps me logged in as long as I don't close out of the "Activate Windows" application. If I boot up a program that's not directly part of Windows, I can keep it running. (I'm actually running Firefox from the old hard drive right now to type this to you guys.) I can even run most services. (Things like Disk Defrag and any of the Administrator Tools.)

But none of this allows me to use the basic stuff. It's pretty much like what you'd see if you closed "explorer.exe" with the Task Manager. I can't use the Task Manager though, nor my CD drive, and 45 seconds isn't anywhere near long enough to transfer 50 gigs of data from this hard drive to the newer one.

So, to reiterate, I need to get the data from this hard drive onto the newer one. No access to it from the new one, and Explorer doesn't run for very long on the old one. I can run applications, but no basic UI. No command prompt either, which sucks.

Oh, on that note, I CAN still install and run programs. So if there's something specific I need to download to handle this, fire away.

E-mail is [e-mail], Yahoo Messenger ID is skrulz_the_capricious if there's any information at all that I missed.

Thank you all in advance!

Answer 1

The previous tension might desire to be put in right into a 2d equipment, as a results of fact the 'slave', which might then not even require the OS as nicely (form the slave). The tension can then be 'explored' and information extracted to the 'grasp' HDD. demands a 2 HDD, IDE cable and jumper to evolve SATA > IDE ; Google for components on the jumper. approximately $20-30 US.

Answer 2

try to attach this this Laptop's HDD to a desktop. and Boot from it if it heaving OS, give user name and password (if u don't know use ERD Disk to break),



then copy data,,

if it doesn't work try to copy from Safe mode(press F8 while booting), its easy to copy..

Answer 3

sounds like a permissions issue.



http://www.le.ac.uk/cc/dsss/docs/acls2.shtml



try that link.