cracked monitor

my gateway 5350 laptop running win2000 has a cracked, unreadable screen. I've tried to get to the data three different ways: by hooking up a monitor (no good), by trying to use a scan converter (no good) and by swapping a hard drive out of a 5300 laptop running win 8 (no good, they're two different sizes). All I really waant to be able to do is to get the data off the drive. I'm not replacing the screen because it costs $550 and the computer on its way out anyway.
I'm a Mac guy anyway, so I'm not quite sure how to do peer to peer with windows. Can I connect the 5300 to the broken 5350 with a crossover ethernet cable? Then what? I'm not sure what the network settings are on the broken 5350 -- i can't see them now anyway.
Any help would be appreciated. Thanks

 

Sounds like you have tried the obvious, just a suggestion, can you remove the harddrive and put it in another machine as a slave? Or at least hook it up as a slave?

SeeYa

 

You can buy IDE adapters quite cheaply to allow laptop drives to plug into a desktop, and that would be the simplest way.

An external monitor on the laptop should work (toggle on/off with Fn-F5 usually)