Easiest way to recover data on Laptop?

[Chadder007]

I have a laptop that is one of those without floppy/CD built in. It has a USB floppy drive and a PCMCIA CD drive that you can't boot from. (no bios support for bootable cdrom)
The Hard Drive won't let me do a recovery from the Win2kCD and floppy boot disks and it seems also that the local permissions are messed up not allowing me into the Console to troubleshoot.
Are there any utilities that I can use that are fairly simple that will allow me to recover some files off of the hard drive?

 

[mrbill14]

Ouch! Good luck with this....

The only thing I can think of is to remove the hard drive from the laptop, get a 2.5" to 3.5" converter (eBay has them - called "laptop hard drive converters" or something like that), and hook it up to another (regular desktop) PC. Copy files over.