Booting a virtual desktop off an external hard drive

[Patman]

My mom's friend's laptop died. I pulled the hard drive from it and put it in a usb 2.0 enclosure. I was wondering if there is any software that could boot, from a windows xp enviroment, a virtual desktop based on the files on the hard drive? This would make it tremendously easier for her to recover files, any ideas guys?

 

[l3ender]

Do you need to boot to it? Can't you just boot into your normal system and access the files anyway?

 

[Patman]

I can, but I think she has quicken data, and other program based data thats eaiser to access and backup when booted to.