Oops looks like my original question did not save or I messed up somehow! Any way my old Emachine laptop which was running windows XP finally died because of this I purchased a new Dell XPS M1330 laptop running windows Vista. Rather than transferring all of the files from my old hard drive to my new laptop I wanted to use the old hard drive like an external hard drive but still be able to access the files whenever I wanted to.

I then purchased a Rocketfish 2.5 enclosure for the old hard drive after installing the hard drive into the enclosure and installing the software that was supplied with the enclosure I attempted to open some of the files thinking that I wouldn’t have any problems doing was greeted with a warning that I did not have the right or the correct privileges to change or open the folder. Can any advise what I need to do to make this drive accessible on any computer?

Thanks,

Lawrencem

I'm not sure, so don't quote me. Can you see the folders but just can't open them?
If possible, see if you can connect to another xp machine and try to transfer disc and then bring to vista machine

If you can access the files on the xp drive on another xp machine, try and share all the folders on the old drive - right click on the drive and then click share and give permmissions to read, write and change files (basically, share everything)

Then see fi the vista machine lets you access the folders

Make sure device mgr in vista sees your hardware enclosure properly and has no yellow marks in device mgr.

All else, get xp laptop going if you can? And try the files and settings transfer wizard in xp and run in vista its Windows easy transfer -

Hope some of these ideas might help somewhat