Power supply and board crashed recently. Hard drive still boots. I have loaded it into two different machines as slave and master. Hard shows as there. The is an owner account, user & all users account. But there is no login screen and the owner account says access denied. I can see the program files, documents and settings folders and program folders but I can't locate the multitude of pictures my wife has on the machine to recovery them. Also tried performing a search which did not find them. Anybody have any ideas how to find them or boot the hard drive in a normal format or normal looking way so that folders can be accessed in a normal manner?!!! Mt wife is freaking out and I really need help here! Thanks!

If you have the drive installed as a secondary drive in a different computer running WinXP you may be able to take ownership of the files/folders. Look in Disk Management for the drive. If it shows there then look at the link below for information on how to take ownership of the files. http://support.microsoft.com/kb/308421 At this point I hope you now realize the importance of backups.

"Hard drive still boots." I don't get that exactly. Two issues. One is boot. You may not need to boot to that disk. As suggested above, you can take ownership. Likewise you could use a knoppix live cd (or other live cd/dvd)to access the data. In the worst case. The other is data recovery. From what you said you may or may not have data failure. Might need something like unstoppable copier. "Best Practices", Event viewer, host file, perfmon, antivirus, anti-spyware, Live CD's, backups, are in my top 10