Windows - Linux Data Recovery

I have an 80gb laptop hard drive that has Linux Mint 6 (Felicia) installed as the main operating system. The machine that I installed this on was a Sony Vaio, and it has since gone bad.

The drive itself its in perfect working condition and the data is intact.

I need a way to access my user folder on the drive from Windows.

I have tried putting the drive in a usb enclosure and booting off it. It wouldn't load into linux all the way.

I tried plugging it into a windows machine and using several recovery tools to no avail.

I did remember trying to access the drive from within Linux, and I could access it, but it says I dont have access to the folder. I know the password for it though. Is there anyway I can get the information off it??

It is very important info and any help would greatly be appreciated.

If there is any other information that one would need to help me out, let me know. I can provide whatever is required.

Attach that hard drive to the desktop as you've done already, but get another LiveCD (any Linux LiveCD would work for this, Ubuntu, Linux Mint, whatever), then boot the desktop PC off that LiveCD with the external drive attached.

When you get into the LiveCD's OS, you should easily be able to access the external drive and then find the files you're looking for and even copy them over to the hard drive in the desktop without issues (even if it's NTFS as most every current LiveCD can read/write to NTFS partitions).

I have done that but it wont let me into /da/home/ when I go to it on that drive. It's password protected from the Linux Mint install...how do I get into that?

Guess you'd have to force taking ownership/permissions somehow. I'm not that up on Linux command line tools for such purposes, maybe someone else can offer better advice in that respect.

If the home partition is password protected, that most likely means its in ecrypted. You're not going to have much luck getting in to it without the password in that case.