Cannot Access Pictures!! PLease HELP!

Ok, so I offered to take a look at my fiancess' friend's laptop which she complained was running slow. She brought it over, along with an external Seagate 80 gig drive she said she used to back everything up with (mainly PICTURES). So I determine there is so much extra crap loaded onto this computer that I should clean install XP and then Service Pack II. All goes well, although for some reason the ethernet connection seems unbearably slow, and her hard drive is also slow (probably 4200 rpm....).

So now I'm at the point where I'm going to copy all of her pictures from the external hard drive back onto the laptop. I try selecting all of them and copying. ACCESS IS DENIED!
I try just to open some picture folders that are in there...... I see the names of the pcitures, but no preview. Try to open up some pictures. NO DICE. So I can't open these pictures up, and I can't copy them onto the laptop. I fell she'll probably be devastated if she loses all of her pictures......

Her Vaio ran some media server thing that had control of her pictures and music, and also had the music in some format other than MP3. Before wiping the laptop I tried to convert them to MP3. SInce they were all from her CD's, I told her just to load them, because I couldn't find a proggy that would do the conversion.

Anyhow, does ANYONE have any ideas on how I can get these pictures off the external hard drive, get them onto the laptop, AND be able to OPEN them????? I don't know what method she used to get all of this stuff onto the external hard drive, whether it was a Sony proprietary backup thing or not..... Everything on the external hard drive had the attribute "Read ONly". Of course I tried to change that, and it didn't work. She has a full of the old Windows install on that ext. hard drive too.... I tried going into the Docs And Settings/user..../ and delete the TEMP directory, but again, access was denied.

PLEASE HELP!!! I don't wanna see a girl cry!! Once I get the pics off the external hard drive, I was planning on deleting that whole Windows install, but I dont' wanna do it until I can salvage these pics!!!

Whether the version of XP installed is Home or Pro, it makes a difference afa the ability to access the My Documents folder. Regardless of the version of XP, you'll need to take ownership of the My Documents folder, and must be logged on to the computer with an account that has administrative priveleges to do so. If the OS is XP Home, you'll need to boot to Safe Mode and logon as Administrator, or use the cacls.exe tool (located in C:\WINDOWS\system32) from an admin account in normal mode in order to make changes to the NTFS file permissions. To enter Safe Mode, hold down the F8 key just before Windows starts to load (just before your PC finishes POST'ing).

Only Pro allows you to disable the simple file sharing mode (My Computer | Tools | Folder Options | "View" tab | Uncheck "Use simple file sharing") and access the security tab in normal mode of operation. Simple file sharing makes the My Documents folder private from everyone, including other Admins, so your files won't be visible to others who logon to the console. By default, XP Pro uses Simple File sharing when it's not joined to a domain.

How to take ownership of a file or folder in Windows XP
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=308421

Thanks. That did the trick.

Took ownership in SAFE mode, rebooted and copied the files over.

Now there will be no girl crying !!! She had 5.86 GIGS of pictures! Maybe a couple of movies here and there, but DAMN !!!!

My pictures folder is 7.33 gig. They add up when you shoot 6.3mp RAW's.

Glad to hear you got them saved.