Need to save/recover data

To all helping: please read this all the way thru before replying!!! I'm not trying to be an a-hole, but I don't need a bunch of links to data recovery software, or undeleters, etc. Here's the deal:
A girl brought me her laptop after she dropped it. The screen is totalled. The PC does not power on. The laptop is basically crashed. She wants to recover as much data as possible from the hard drive (pics, music, docs, etc). I removed the HD from the laptop, hooked it up to a healthy PC as a secondary drive, and was able to recover most of her stuff; the hard drive was miraculously not damaged in the drop to the kitchen floor. HOWEVER- the crashed PC's main user account was passworded, and she used the "protect my files and folders" option, preventing me from accessing some stuff. I tried using the ol' "take ownership" method outlined here, that didn't work. I have tried booting to PE discs, I have tried booting to Linux. I simply cannot access these folders. The original OS on the crashed laptop was Vista Home Premium, probably 32bit. If anyone has any insight, suggestions, advice, thoughts, whatever, please share!!! Thanks!

 

I'm not sure if it will work but, on the PC that you are using to do the recovery, you could try creating a user account with the exact same username and password that she used on the dropped computer. Login to that account and see if that satisfies MS security.

 

hi dlb: you will probably think i am insane, but if I were faced with your problem, I would get the password for her user account. then put her HDD on another computer and try to boot it into safe mode. log on with her acct. Then use advanced properties to turn off file or folder encryption as necessary. The only thing I dont know is if micropoops copy protection will let the os run since it is obviously not on an authenticated system. Good Luck. Jerry

 

HEY!!! That's a good idea!!! I'll give it a go!

Also a good idea, but even in Safe Mode, Vista gets VERY unhappy when hardware is totally different, but I guess it's worth a try!

Thanks for the suggestions!
:major