Won't recognize other drive

I'm trying to get some files off my son's computer's hard drive. The installation in his computer seems to be corrupted. I can boot it to a login screen, but have no control over mouse or keyboard. It won't boot into safemode or last known good configuration, just keeps going back to the login screen. I took the harddrive out, a Seagate, and plugged it into my own computer. I set it as master on the 2nd IDE channel, (I unplugged the DVD drive and used that cable because it is a single cable. When I boot my computer, WinXP shows me that it recognizes the new drive, but I can't find it when I try to navigate to it in Explorer. I just need to copy the My Docs folder over to my computer so that we can transfer them from there to his new laptop. Any help would be appreciated.

 

Have you tried using a BartPE or UBCD4Win disc?

 

No, I have not. I'm working under the assumption that the drive has not gone bad since it boots up to the login screen on the original computer.

 

By this, do you mean you can see the drive listed in 'My Computer', but not being able to access it by double clicking on it?

Have you tried accessing it via the command prompt? If you can do that, you should be able to do the copying by that method.

If that don't work, I'd still suggest using either a BartPE or UltimateBootCD disc. Since the hard drive isn't totally dead, you should be able to get access to the drive with either of them.

 

No, it is not seen in My Computer and does not show up in disk management. I'll see about the BartPE.

 

I tried BartsPE, but don't know enough about the program to use it to access any drive information. I couldn't tell how to navigate within the interface. I will give Ultimate Boot CD a try.

 

I apologize. I mistakenly referred to UltimateBootCD, when I meant to refer to UBCD4Win (I edited my original post and changed the UltimateBootCD link to UBCD4Win). They are both great tools, but UBCD4Win is the one you would most likely want to be using to gain access to the drive.

 

I checked Device Manager, and the drive is seen there. Still working on boot CD's.