[Thinkpad] Can't copy some files from C: (mounted as USB external elsewhere)

My T41p is acting up. It's either a hardware problem with the screen or a software problem with a video driver. Before they'll service it, IBM wants me to update all the drivers.

That's reasonable enough, but since the symptom is locking up a minute or two after boot (sometimes sooner) even in Safe Mode (well, it happened the one time I tried it in Safe Mode, apart from the dozen or so with a normal boot), I want to back up my files first.

Shouldn't be too hard, I took the internal drive (whatever IBM offered as a 60Gb, 7200RPM) out and hooked it up to a USB port on a desktop machine. The latter recognized it right away.

The problem is that I can copy many files from drive N: (my notebook's C: drive) but not all, including N:\Documents and Settings\Andrew (!) for which I get the message that it "...is not accessible. Access is denied.".

Until a month ago I had most of my data in C:\DATA (holdover from the old days) and only recently moved it under "My Documents". :(

Why would the folder be inaccessible? I created an account on this desktop machine with the name "Andrew" and the same password, to no avail. Is it likely because the notebook has been shutting down abnormally? If I can get it to stay up long enough to shut down, am I likely to have access to this folder? Or is there something more insidious going on?

Thanks!
=aw
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Received on Fri Jan 19 13:17:22 2007