Hi!
Thanks for having me!

My PC underwent a SUCRI (Stupid User Coffee Related Incident), and the power and board got fried. I opened it up and rescued the HD.
I am on an old emergency laptop now and put the fried PC HD in an enclosure, attached it via USB and saw that the contents are there (with no desktop files, strangely).
I changed the laptop BIOS seq to boot from USB, but when it tries to do so, it brings back disk error.
Is there some sort of formatting I have to do to the now external HD? Take ownership of folders somehow? Change HD master/slaev settings?
I though I could just boot up the OS and relevant signons (XP) from the ext HD, and rescue my data by copying it to the laptop (also XP) or another ext HD...
Interestingly, also the old laptop? I lost the admin password, so I'm signed on as a regular restricted user... does THAT impact my efforts too?
Thoughts?

Thanks much!
Mantas

Best to boot from the laptop hard drive especially since you're trying to recover data; and just use the old HD as the external USB drive. If most of your documents are stored under "My Documents" on the old hard drive you'll need admin rights to take ownership. You can use any computer as long as you have admin rights. "Users" do not have rights to view all folders under C: and unless you specifically saved files elsewhere, most of your files will be stored under c:\%userprofile%\my documents which usually is c:\document and settings\<username>\my documents.

Best to boot from the laptop hard drive especially since you're trying to recover data; and just use the old HD as the external USB drive. If most of your documents are stored under "My Documents" on the old hard drive you'll need admin rights to take ownership. You can use any computer as long as you have admin rights. "Users" do not have rights to view all folders under C: and unless you specifically saved files elsewhere, most of your files will be stored under c:\%userprofile%\my documents which usually is c:\document and settings\<username>\my documents.

Hi Raj2160!

First, thanks for taking the time to answer me. I figured it was permissions, but I yield to you folks for experience.

I have a thorny problem still of being on the User login on the laptop; it's been a year since I used the laptop, and I forgot the Admin password. Some threads recommend a complete reinstall of the XP OS, others say there's free ways to reset or recover the Admin password. Any thoughts on something to accomplish this?

Again thanks for your time!
Mantas

XP is easy to reset. There are commercial tools available but there is a freeware program as well that essentially mounts the volume in linux and modifies the registry files to reset the password.

http://home.eunet.no/pnordahl/ntpasswd/

You'll need to be able to burn an ISO from the url above and boot with it. Follow the instructions on the walkthrough page if you are not familiar with the sam files or the utility.