Need advice on reinstalling recovered data

Its nice to be back to this family. One of the few places I know to go for help.

Well, I have somewhat good news as per my drama of having my Vista machine die on me--after the tech dude fried his motherboard trying to replace my dying board.

The instructor from the tech school was able to recover data from both of my drives--one being above named Vista, and my storage driveusing Win2K OS.

I guess its okay to mention that my friends wife (who works in a hospital) had one of the doctors donate his old machine to me--being that I have to have it for daily functioning. It runs on XP which I'm not a fan of. Nonetheless, I can now try to rebuild my system data. But now having my restored data files from other two drives, I'm not sure what I have to do to put that on the XP machine. I can see some .exe files but I don't know how to transpose them; i.e, getting web links from Firefox, or software to put Nikon photos to HD. I really don't understand how to incorporate ini or dll files to approiate file.

I'm sorta wondering if this instructor properly extracted files from other drives so I can read them. That is what I need so as to rebuild stuff--if that all makes sense. And I'm also wondering if this can be properly handeled here, or does someone have to physically be here to see whats on backup disc (files were compressed which I unzipped). I bascially wonder if there is a way I can actually read these so to put stuff back together.

Can anyone give me some kind of instructions as to how I extract my web links or make exe files work? I'm willing to provide my e-mail address if someone understands me and can guide me through the process. After losing my Vista stuff and now trying to start over is a new (and sad experience) for me. I also miss Vistas version of Majong too. :crybaby:

Thank you for your understanding.

If the hard drive is in working condition you can simply extract the files from it via LiveCD. Later on you can simply insert the bootable disc and access the folders. Second thing if you have a working system you can connect the hard disk directly to it and on reboot you can see the partitions. From there you can copy paste the data and take a backup.