Hard drive data recovery
 

So my laptop's motherboard bit the dust over the summer (yay dell). As a result, all my music and photos from a semester abroad are on that harddrive. So, my girlfriend picked up this thing for me that turns a laptop harddrive into an external. Its basically an aluminum case with usb/firewire cable attachments. I stuck the hd into it, and it works fine.

The only problem is, when I try to get into my profile and my documents, it informs me that access is denied.

Any suggestions?

Is there any way to boot/load windows off of a usb drive?

I'd appreciate any help you can give. Thanks.

Right-click the directory, select Properties, then the Security tab. You can open up permissions for different users or go into advanced and change the owner.

If it's XP Home you'll need to boot in safe mode as a user with admin privs.

As for booting XP externally, it isn't easy. XP resets USB during boot which makes it lose its mind. It's possible to boot into a shell and get around it but it's a bit frankenstein. Besides that you usually have different hardware between systems and therefore the hal & driver requirements change.

Thanks, that worked. Finally I can get to my music!