I am trying to back up a friends data off of her laptop, as her son has corrupted the install of XP on the computer to the point that I can't fix it without formatting.

I have read through the forums and tried everything mentioned. I've enabled both the hard drive and the thumb drive to be writable, however I still get the error"You cannot drop any items into a directory in which you do not have write permissions". I have checked the write permissions and everything is how it should be. Could someone help me out here? Thank you.