Win Vista Corrupted Drive Access Denied Via Win 8.1?

Hi all,
I had a ~5 y.o. laptop with Vista on it (but originally had XP, was upgraded to Vista). A few weeks ago, I was not able to boot it, safe mode wouldn't work either. The hard drive is a Seagate Momentus 7200.1. 100mb drive and had two partitions on it. The C: drive was the "system drive" with some other files on there and a D: partition with mostly personal files.

I've since purchased a new laptop running Windows 8.1.

I wanted to retrieve my data/files from the unbootable drive so I bought an IDE/SATA to USB adapter and removed the drive from the old laptop.

It worked fine for getting the files from the D: partition, but the C: partition is not recognizable.

So I downloaded bootsect (for 32 bit) and ran it like this:

F:\>bootsect /nt60 F:
Target volumes will be updated with BOOTMGR compatible bootcode.

Could not map drive partitions to the associated volume device objects:
Access is denied.

F:\>bootsect /nt60 F: /force
Target volumes will be updated with BOOTMGR compatible bootcode.

Could not map drive partitions to the associated volume device objects:
Access is denied.

F:\>

Click to expand...

I've made sure that F: has full admin & even user permissions. Still, access is denied.

Ideas on how I can retrieve files from the corrupted (removed) old hard drive?

Thanks.

You should consider using Window data recovery apps. One free one is Recuva. If you're willing to spend some money, one of the best I've used is RecoverMyFiles.

It may be that the C: partition is really messed up. You could try booting up with a Linux Live DVD like Xubuntu, and see if you can pull any documents, photos, music, videos off of the old C drive. If you are trying to pull programs from the C: partition, that you would not be able to do.

You need to run a S.M.A.R.T. utility on that old drive, to see if it is failing. As long as you granted permissions on the old drive to Everyone under Security for C:, then you should be able to access it.

Many thanks for the reply's! Much appreciated.

I had used one of the built in Win 8.1 utilities (I think) to check the integrity of the F: drive (which is the old laptop hardrive with C: and D: connected via the usb adapter), and it said all was fine.

I don't want any programs from C:, I know that isn't viable, only certain files. Specifically, my I.E. bookmarks.

I've downloaded Recuva, and it's showing thousands of files, many unrecoverable. Some even from the recycling bin, so this tells me it's accessing the C: partition (as that's the only recycling bin I used).