Trying to view folder I get... inaccessible. Access Denied.

My friends laptop HDD was playing up and it was replaced under warranty.

He got the old drive back and has asked me to recover whatever files I can
from it.

Ive managed to get all of the data off for his wife and kids. But cannot
access his own "My Documents" folder.

It just says inaccessible. Access Denied.

I'm presuming he set a user password when logging in to Windows XP. He's a
way on hol at the mo so I cant reach him right away to ask. I'm not booting
up from the drive I have just attached it to a secondary IDE to view and
copy any relevant data files. Assuming I can get the password how/where
would I enter it in order to make these folders accessible?

Thanks for any info.

Ian

Ian R wrote...
>
>My friends laptop HDD was playing up and it was replaced under warranty.
>
>He got the old drive back and has asked me to recover whatever files I can
>from it.
>
>Ive managed to get all of the data off for his wife and kids. But cannot
>access his own "My Documents" folder.
>
>It just says inaccessible. Access Denied.
>
>I'm presuming he set a user password when logging in to Windows XP. He's a
>way on hol at the mo so I cant reach him right away to ask. I'm not booting
>up from the drive I have just attached it to a secondary IDE to view and
>copy any relevant data files. Assuming I can get the password how/where
>would I enter it in order to make these folders accessible?

Here is a non invasive method.

Try to ghost the hard drive partition to a ghost image on another hdd.
Then use ghost explorer to see if you can explore the files in question
inside the ghost image.

See how far you can go.