Crashed Hard Drive Data Retrieval

I recently had a laptop hard drive crash on me and am trying to rescue some of the data on the original drive.

As such, I've extracted my failed hard drive and installed it in a USB enclosure. I've been successful retrieving some data but am getting "Acces is denied." popups whenever I try to access files under my "Documents and Settings\username" folder.

What's strange (to me) is I can access files under my girlfriend's "Documents and Settings\girlfriend-username" folder but cannot access the files under the username directories.

Suggestions?

You may wish to try one of the Linux-based rescue CDs that you can boot from. These may help work around permissions errors, if in fact the pop-ups you see are generated by permissions errors and not by filesystem corruption.

See the answers to the SF question Favorite system recovery Live CD?.

Have you tried SpinRite?

Steve knows his stuff, and SpinRate has saved my bacon before. The tool is very mature. You can purchase and download at grc.com. I am not a shill, just a customer.