Help reading HDD from scrapped laptop

[mach1]

Following a (very) unfortunate mishap, I have a Sony Vaio laptop which has been trashed by cracking the screen. The vaio was fitted with an 80Gb Toshiba HDD, so I got myself a SATA to IDE adapter and reckoned I would be able to install it as the primary drive in a desktop thus being able to access the stuff in 'My Documents'.

Unfortunately (!*) when the PC boots, it starts OK but then indicates that Windows needs to be registered. When I try to do so, it says it is already registered! Is this a case of a 'bodged Sony OEM' version of Windows Home Media - which refuses to run on non-Sony hardware?

Any ideas how I would be able to read the contents of 'My Documents'? I can clearly use the disk as a slave in the desktop, but as far as I am aware there is no way that this will let me get access to files in the 'My Documents' area.

Any help (very) gratefully received.

Regards

Mach1

 

[mach1]

'Fraid the whole laptop has had it - although it DID work briefly using an external monitor.

As for using the drive as a slave, I'll take a look at the Microsoft page and see how I get on. My initial problem, when I connected it 'as a slave' in a desktop was that somehow it kept 'taking command'! However I set the jumper on the existing Maxtor IDE drive, the bios insisted in trying to boot from the Toshiba laptop drive - instead of the maxtor. I didn's seem to be able to alter this using the BIOS setup. Any thoughts on this, as whatever I do, I imagine SOMEHOW I need to get it inside a working desktop - behaving as a slave - not a master.

Thanks

Mach1

 

[mach1]

I too would have expected to be able to set the boot sequence for the hard drives in the bios setup, but it obstinately refuses to accept anything apart from the Toshiba disk. I think getting the disk enclosure to turn the drive into a 80Gb usb drive sounds like the way forward. I had thought of this, but had initially ruled it out as I thought it would be straight forward to put the drive INSIDE the desktop! Using this approach, I can boot the desktop as normal and THEN plug in the USB - which I hope will solve things.

Thanks to everyone.