Cannot read files from removed XP hard drive - access privileges

I was having a gateway desktop running with Windows XP. I was having Huge Data on the same. Due to some damage the computer stopped working. Hence in order to recover my data available on HDD I bought a new AirLink 101 hard drive enclosure. Packed the HDD in enclosure and connected it on my Windows Vista running laptop.

Hard Drive was detected properly but when I try to open any of my files I was getting error messages. For example while trying to open an Excel document it says “employment.xls' cannot be accessed. The file may be corrupted, located on a
server that is not responding, or read-only. Excel cannot access 'employment.xls'. The document may be read-only or
encrypted.”

Similarly while opening any image from the old HDD, it says “Photo Gallery can't open the picture because you do not have permission to access the file location.” Same thing happens with MS Word Doc or many other files.

Any idea how can I fix this problem? All helps appreciated.

As the Administrator/owner of all these files (saved on old HDD) was different and here on the laptop, it is different. So first of all you will need to take owner ship of those files in order to access them. Just checkout this KB to know how to take owner ship: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/308421

Thanks a lot for the reply and solution Billie. I tried to follow the steps mentioned in that article but getting stuck at the first step itself. They say to get logged in as the Administrator. But how can I do that when I am plaguing the XP running HDD with Vista running laptop? Is it to be logged in as Vista Administrator?

Yes offcourse you need to log in as Vista Administrator in order to take owner ship of files on Vista computer, and not as the XP administrator.

Im in the same situation. I got a vista computer, and attached my xp hard drive as the secondary drive. To access the files on the xp drive, I had to do the following while logged in as a vista administrator

What I did:
1) navigate to the top level folder (for me C:\Docouments and Settings\mm)
2) right click the folder
3) Take Ownership