About a year ago, my motherboard over heated and died, killing my old PC...

Since then, I've converted my old hard drive into a external USB hard drive to salvage my old files off the drive.

Everything worked swimmingly until it came to accessing my old "my document" folders... There were multiple accounts on he machine before it's death and mine was the only one password protected and I believe it's my undoing.

I cannot retrieve, access, look at, delete, or otherwise interact with the data.
I've tried changing the permissions on the whole hard drive, I've tried changing the permissions on all the folders which sort of worked, as I can go inside them. When it comes to accessing the files inside ]folders however, nothing I do will let me access them or change permissions.

Is there any advice anyone can give me to access my files?
I'm currently running off Window's 7 and the files on the hard drive were running off XP.

I am pulling out my hair on this one.
Please help!

You can check your drive into other system if data is accessible or not.
If everything found well means there might be some problem with your system settings.