how to access the administrator folder on external hard drive?

hi all, my laptop died and (i think i fried the motherboard) and i desperately need to rescue some docs from my hard drive ASAP. i bought a cheap external hard drive case and installed my laptop hdd so i can hook it up to a friend's computer and hopefully save my docs. i don't have the money or parts right now to fix my laptop.
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i can open up my hard drive and have access to certain parts, like the program files, etc... but what i need are docs that i kept in "My Documents" folder and on my desktop. The only way (i think) i can get access to them is through f:\documents and settings\administrator folder. however, when i try to open the administrator folder, an error message pops up with: "f:\documents and settings\administrator is not accessible. Access is denied." i had password on my welcome screen for window xp does that matter? i haven't been prompted for it when trying to access the administrator folder.

what sucks is that i can access f:\documents and settings\guest and see guest docs, but that's not what i need. Can u help?

I've tried changing the read-only setting & sharing the folder, but no success. thanks