SPECIFIC QUESTION REGARDING WIN XP SYSTEMS:
  Very common scenario: Motherboard fails. You pull the hard drive to
get the old info off, put into another machine, it becomes the D
drive, you navigate to "Documents and Settings", go to whatever user
folders, etc., and drag-and-drop the content to the C drive, then you
can move, copy, whatever. HOWEVER: if the user had set up a password,
you get message - Not Accesible. Access is denied.
  Question: is there a way around this? (I mean, of course, short of
sending to a data recovery company for multiple hundred $$$)

I like the first answer, this may work but you have to make sure that
you dont have incompatible drivers on the disk as this will cause a
blue screen, also windows activation may screw you over too, it is a
bit more of an annoyance to complete now that you have the harddrive
in the machine already.

The way to access the files on the D drive (the drive to be copied
from) is to right click it and choose properties. Now choose security
from the tabs at the top, now click on ADD and add the administrator
account to your permission list.

now click advanced and click REPLACE permission entries on all child
objects with entries shown here.

This will now set the permissions on the D drive (the one you wish you
copy from)  to allow your local machine full access to the server.

You should not be able to copy the data from the drive. Alternatively
when you get an access denied problem you can right click the
directory where you had your access denied and explicitly apply the
access permission to the folder.

Hope this helps

--Keystroke-ga

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Clarification of Answer by keystroke-ga on 26 Jul 2006 02:06 PDT

I would also like to give you some background into why you are
experiencing the problems with "access denied" too.

When a computer is installed with a workgroup version of windows XP
(one that is not in a domain) each individual PC becomes its own
Security IDentification (SID) server. Every permission on your PC is
controlled via this SID. This is why when a user named JOHN is created
and opens files and saves them as his he is ok to continue accessing
the files. If you delete this user JOHN but realise later that you
wish you hadn't you cannot just recreate the user JOHN and expect him
to have access to the files because both the JOHN user accounts will
have different SID numbers and, in the eyes of windows XP, be
completely different users.

By default the administrator of a PC (the one you are using to access
the hard drive from the failed machine) has the power to give himself
permissions to access the drive and to any data that is secured using
an Access Control List (ACL) where the administrator does not already
have the required permission. By taking ownership or explicitly giving
yourself the required security permission to access the drive you are
overwriting the ACL list by adding your SID to the list and allowing
yourself access to the drive.

The other thing you need to be careful about are directories that are
encrypted. You will not be able to decrypt the user documents if the
contents are encrypted as the decrytor key will not be stored in the
local windows XP store. When windows XP is in a domain you can use an
account designed to have access to all the encryption keys within the
domain.

If the data is encrypted you will need to boot directly from the
harddrive, if the PC blue screens while booting up you will need to do
a repair install by inserting your windows XP disk and choosing to
repair windows XP, this will install the correct drivers and the
correct power management software for th new pc you are running the
drive on. Without the correct power management software the machine
won't boot. If you do do this MAKE SURE you do a repair and NOT a
clean install as this will lose your settings, not a good move.

If you have any comments don't hesitate to leave them.

--Keystroke-ga

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Request for Answer Clarification by hamstudio-ga on 26 Jul 2006 17:40 PDT

1.You mention "right click ptoperties, then go to Security tab"
2. There is no Security tab, the tabs are General, Tools, Hardware,
Sharing, and Quota.
3. I went into Sharing tab, there are some Sharing and Security tabs/
options, none of this worked.
4. I never saw any "ADD" tab.
 Incidentally, regarding the other (not yours) comment, of course I
tried just a straight boot on another board, in fact, I tried 5 other
(all different) boards. Under XP, what happens is sometimes it will
fire up (usually goes to safe mode, then loads drivers for awhile,
then you can enter the user password, and copy files to root level of
drive, then pull drive, plug into another machine and get the files).
However, as you mentioned, often the drive will not fire up - goes to
blue stop screen or just re-cycles.
  Also, I tries the Repair console method, that does not work becaue
it asks for an Administrator password. But the machine (original
source of C drive) did not have an admin password, only user password
under one of the users.

---

Clarification of Answer by keystroke-ga on 27 Jul 2006 08:46 PDT

You are using a computer that is in a workgroup, I should have
realised that you would have simple file sharing enabled.

In order to display the security tab in windows XP that is in a
workgroup do the following.

http://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/windows/xp/all/proddocs/en-us/acl_sec_tab.mspx?mfr=true

Once you have completed that step you should now be able to assign
administrator the permissions to access everything on the hard drive.

Any other problems let me know.

--Keystroke-ga

I helped a friend out with this problem a while ago and this seemed to
work for us. It wasn't a complicated solution, but we just didn't
think about it for a while.

Why not just change your jumpers to make the pulled hard drive primary
(C:) and the new system's target hard drive secondary (D:). You should
just be able to boot from C, log into the old user account, copy
whatever you want over to D, and then switch the jumpers back. As long
as the old drive still boots and you know whatever passwords are
needed, you should be able to get away doing it that way.

It took us a while of head mashing to come to this conclusion, even
though it doesn't seem that complicated of an idea. Hopefully this
helps you out, if you've already tried something similar and it didn't
work I don't know how else to help you. There might be a way to do it
in Windows directly, but this is pretty quick. Good luck.

I had this problem once, I Right click on the new drive, Properties,
Security, my user name appeard however the drive did have permissions
for my username, I checked off all the boxes, clicked Apply, I think
it then confirmed that I wanted to take ownership or something like
that, I of course clicked Ok. 20 minutes later I had access to
everything.

It all depends how much trouble you are willing to take to get the data back 
the above answer is near perfection, however it you have still not
solved the problem then it can be easily done with third party tools.

If you need more info drop in a message and I will see that I help you

do you simply want read access?

Boot the system witha Live Cd (knoppix)