Apologies - but as a Mac user i don't know where else to look for this!

My partner is, for reasons best known to here, still in the windows world. However she's just had an experience that might help us (me and my son) convert her. But before we get there we need to overcome a bit of a problem. Both the motherboard and the power supply on her you know what machine have gone & I'm trying to get the data off onto my nice safe iMac. I've got the disc hooked into another Xp machine but even with an account name & password identical to her original we can't access the folders in her "My Docs". Any suggestions gratefully accepted!

what sort of imac is it

your best bet is to get a cheap usb2 enclosure and connect the drive to your imac

you will be able to read off the disk

you can always use the enclosure later for back-ups for your macs once you have rescued her data and earned plenty of brownie points in the process

On the old hard disk look under 'Documents and Settings\username\My Documents' It will not show under the GUI 'My Documents' as that is owned by the username on the running computer (and that is unique)

USB enclosure / Mac OS reading disc question now - sorry

OS X will ignore the Windows security?

(Desktop is a iMac 5,1 also have MacBook Pro2,2 for working on)

Yes, just as Dysfunction states, go into old hard drives directory listing, C: \Documents and Settings\%username%\My Documents (where %username% is her user account login name