Friends of mine fried their Dell family box. The fan outlet had been blocked to long so the poor thing died. They carted in a new one; the new models seem to anticipate on overheating, as they have a very cool air inlet on the front side as well.

Anyway, I was asked to salvage the contents of the old machine. I took our family Dell and set to work. Some observations which might be of help to others:

• At first sight the hard disk of an old Dell is connected with a short IDE ribbon cable. This is not a standard cable, after replacing it with a standard cable the drive becomes invisible to the machine.
• It's no problem to attach the extra disk to the secondary IDE.
• The My documents folders were all set to a private visibility. This is handled by the NTFS file system and keeps working when the drive is in another machine.
• To be able to read these folders you have to take ownership of the folder. This is handled in an advanced page of the folders property .
• XP home does not show this property page by default.
• When you run your machine in safe mode, (press F8 at boot) the desired property page does show up and you can take possesion of the drive.

The main lesson I learned is that under the hood XP home is even more like XP pro than I knew. Googling around I found many a suggestion to install all kinds of scary tools or perform bizarre rituals. No need, it's just a (safe) boot away.