Well, today my friend brought over his old computer which apparently died about 2 years ago, in hopes that I might be able to fix it... in the end, the answer was no. So he asked me if I could at least salvage all the MP3s off of it, and I promised to do what I can. So I removed the harddrive and attatched it to my computer, and sure enough, it had survived, even with the 20 or so viruses/trojans I promptly scanned and deleted.

Anyway, the files were tucked away in his my documents folder, and the drive wouldn't let me anywhere near it. After my failed attempt to access the files directly, I attempted to access them by setting his harddrive as the master, and transferring them over to my harddrive, which utterly failed when windows failed to acknowledge my mouse and keyboard (which were working on the bios before windows loaded). After THAT, I looked online and found a post on this messageboard with a link to an explaination on how to change ownership of files/folders in windows safe mode... but for some odd reason my computer always fails and restarts when I try to access safe mode (a major problem indeed).

So I would really be happy if anybody could help me either get my mouse and keyboard working on my friend's windows, or get safe mode running (prefferably safe mode!).

Please help! And thank you if you try. ^^;;

you cannot set his as master , different hardware.
put yours back in with his as slave
boot to a dos prompt and copy the folder to your drive

Yeah, I assumed that's what the problem was, but to be honest, with that sort of thing I haven't a clue.

Anyways, I just tried booting to a dos prompt, but since windows XP doesn't run off dos (I've heard, and assume, but may be wrong) I have to load "safe mode with dos prompt", which unfortunately fails as surely as normal safemode does. Thanks for the help though, one more failed attempt means more information to solve the problem with (unfortunately, I ran out of tricks when I wrote this post ).

Please tell me if XP does run off dos, though... you may have an alternative way to access it, and that'll probably solve my problem. Dos is the convenient solution to many things, and I very much miss it.

http://www.bootdisk.com/bootdisk.htm

They have boot disks that you can make that will get you where you need to be. Then you should be able to copy the files.

Good luck.

Oh nice! I never even thought of using a boot disk...

As soon as I get a disk to write to, I'll tell you if it worked. ^________^

You may want to run full A/V, A/S scans after you get it going with the boot disk.
failure to run in safemode is very suspious, sometimes indictating a trojan or rootkit in command to prevent removal.