external hard drive no access question

Hi, I had an Emachine that took a dump - it stopped booting up on startup. I
took it to geek squad and they told me that there was a problem with the
computer seeing the hard drive on start up and that's why it would not boot
up. They advised that they could extract the information off my (now dead)
emachine hard drive for $275. I left.

A friend told me that I could remove it from the emachine and connect it to
my new computer as an external hard drive, which I did. Now with my new Dell
I can see the local disk F and all the files inside it however, when trying
to access any folder, particularly the important one...Desktop, I get the
following error message: "F:\Documents and Settings\Desktop is not
accessible. Access is denied."

I have messed around with sharing and security with individual files and
with the entire root and cannot get it to let me in.

I am wondering the following things:

I have a bunch of pictures on the original hard drive desktop....is there a
way to tell if they are they still there with no access?

What might I have to do to make accessing these files in this external hard
drive possible?

I thank anyone for any help you can give me with this.

Of great historical significance to all, emachinetodell
<emachinetodell@discussions.microsoft.com> declared on Tue, 24
Jun 2008 21:27:01 -0700:

> Hi, I had an Emachine that took a dump - it stopped booting
> up on startup. I took it to geek squad and they told me that
> there was a problem with the computer seeing the hard drive
> on start up and that's why it would not boot up. They
> advised that they could extract the information off my (now
> dead) emachine hard drive for $275. I left.
>
> A friend told me that I could remove it from the emachine and
> connect it to my new computer as an external hard drive,
> which I did. Now with my new Dell I can see the local disk F
> and all the files inside it however, when trying to access
> any folder, particularly the important one...Desktop, I get
> the following error message: "F:\Documents and Settings
> \Desktop is not accessible. Access is denied."
>
> I have messed around with sharing and security with
> individual files and with the entire root and cannot get it
> to let me in.
>
> I am wondering the following things:
>
> I have a bunch of pictures on the original hard drive
> desktop....is there a way to tell if they are they still
> there with no access?
>
> What might I have to do to make accessing these files in this
> external hard drive possible?
>
> I thank anyone for any help you can give me with this.

You may need to take ownership of the files/folders, see

How to take ownership of a file or folder in Windows XP
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/308421/en-us

hth
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