OK my old computers mother board fried.. so I got another computer same intel celeron same emachines brand but they both r using same mother board go figure... so I was going to try to slavage the information on the old hard drive and yes the computer recignises it perfectly fine shows up on my computer as local disk g drive right next to local disk c drive but when I go to get to documents and setings and try to click on my name I'm getting acess denied but I'm able to view shared how to I get around this 3 year old computer sum very important stuff I need to save documents, pics of family who r no longer here etc... I never got around to backing it up so I'm in a huge predicerment here was told it was possible but no luck ohh and I removed the jumper on the back of the slave drive as well please help uhh... :confused: :confused:

For a start, you have both drives working in windows. That means the jumper connection on the back of the drive is OK. Don't change any settings on the physical hard drive from now on!

It sounds like you need to change permissions on this drive so that you can access all the subfolders on it.

Ensure you are logged on to the computer as a local administrator to perform this task.

Now, double click "my compuer" and right click your drive (G) and select "properties"

Select the "Security" tab and click the "Advanced" button.
Click the "Owner" tab

In the list you should see your administrator account, select it and tick the box that says "replace owner on subcontainers and objects"
Click Ok and this should take a while to complete.

When done go to the permissions tab and "add" yourself to the list with appropriate permissions.

Tick the box that says "Reset permissions on all child objects and enable propagation of inheritable permissions" and click OK

If any boxes come up that I have not menitoned here, just read them carefully and the answer is usually logical.

This should give you back access to these folders!

OK when I right click (g) drive and click properties it doesn't show any tabs that say security it has tabs for { general, tools, hardware, sharing, quota} I went to best buy talked to 1 of them geek sqaud guys and he couldn't tell me jack other then try right clicking my g drive and try to change it from read only but it doesn't allow me to I'm still getting this messge... ( G:\documents and settings\[chris]{its my file I'm getting locked out of} is not accessible. Access denied. Any other ideas

What version of Windows do you have? If it's XP Home this won't work.

If you have XP pro try turning simple file sharing off:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/307874/en-us

If you can do that then the Security tab will appear and you can try the rest of my suggestion.

If you do have XP home I would suggest putting that hard drive in a PC with Pro version (or win 2000) to retrieve those documents. Once done, just put it back into your machine and format away!

It's a xp home drive.. damit I do have another comp with win milenium but it's a amd chip not a intel chip[ >? Was told that wouldn't work either

No, Millennium Edition cannot read NTFS files! Time to take some beers to a friend's house :)