Unable to read from My documents on laptop hard drive externally

Recently, my laptop power board stopped working,so essentially my laptop is dead, I didnt want to spend 200$ for fixing the power board. I did not backup my data from the hard drive before that happened. I was under the impression that I could take out the hard drive from the laptop and connect it as an external hard drive to copy the data.
When I connected the laptop hard drive as an external USB Hard drive, I could see all files which are in the root, but not files which are in the "Documents and Settings\Owner ". When I click on the Owner folder, it shows that as permission denied. I had a password protected login screen on my laptop. All my data and files reside in Owner\My Documents folder.

Please suggest a method by which I could access the My Documents folder.

Thank you

 

Even with the same username and password, your security token (SID-based) would be different under any other operating system instance, including a second instance of XP.

Make sure you have Administrator priviliges.

Then assert ownership over what is now a slave drive. Start at it root entry; e.g. E:\
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/308421

 

thank you Bill for giving the suggestion and providing the link. I was able to access my data files.