Recovering files from a laptop

I have a laptop that is broken and beyond economic repair (Ie it costs more to fix than is worth doing so). However, the hard drive IS in good condition. I know I want to recovery pictures from the drive, but there may be more files I want to recover so I would prefer to be able to explore the full contents.

So I started out putting the hard drive in a different laptop (laptop2). Obviously it wouldn't boot from the hard drive, but I was able to load the windows recovery tool from a windows CD. From here I hit my hurdle. "Access Denied" when attempting to access Program Files, Documents and Settings, and a few other places. After doing a little research I discovered this is deliberate and unavoidable - there is a command to grant access (set allowallpaths = true), but that itself won't work unless a policy within Windows was set ahead of time.

Further research gives me three options to continue:

1. Buy a laptop hard drive enclosure and a connect it to a PC via USB
2. Try a repair Windows install on the hard drive, using laptop2
3. Run BartPE and go from there

I hesitate over each option for these respective reasons:

1. I'm worried I'll be faced with permissions problems because the files will be available only to users of that old windows installation, not the users on laptop2. Is this true, or will it work?
2. Solutions like this feel riskier as files are written and removed. If something goes wrong with this approach, I'll be unable to fix it with any of the others. Is this unnecessary worry? Would a repair install even work in this situation?
3. I've read about BartPE but honestly, I don't understand what it is. Again, I'd be worried I'd risk losing the files I'm trying to save.

Which option sounds best, or is there an even better solution I missed?

Many thanks again,

Daf

 

Have a look here:
http://www.winxptutor.com/ownership.htm
Similar for Vista and 7

 

Option 1 is a good idea, and you can follow gcwesq's suggestion to take ownership of the files.

depending on how much information you need to recover, you can use a linux live cd to boot from the cd (it will not make any changes to your drive) and copy things to a usb drive or network shared drive.

ubuntu is real user friendly to get started.
http://www.ubuntu.com/

 

Thanks for the fast responses guys, gotta love this site.

Okay following your advice I've ordered a laptop HDD enclosure for future problems, and making a linux live boot cd to tackle this one. I hadn't realized there were boot CDs that actually booted to a GUI (always something I wished Windows boot CDs did though). I think I'm going to end up using that a lot.

Thanks again.