<human>: Could you distill the essence of the text into 1-3 sentences?

So my computer died and I took out the hard drive. I hooked it up to an external set of wires. I was able to browse the program files and drivers and such but then I tried browsing desktop and it says I don't have permission.

I tried to edit the permission but I can't do that either.

So I came here to type this question and had the brilliant idea to boot from USB into that hard drive and retrieve it that way. When I tried, it restarted and booted Windows 7. That's apparently not an option either. 

The spare hard drive is Windows XP and only 100GB but it has some files I really, really want to save. How can I retrieve them.
<bot>: Can't access desktop folder to get my files off old hard drive. Can't boot onto hard drive because of suspected hardware incompatibility.