Need help with my expired activation

[pcjedimasta]

k heres the deal. i bought windows xp home, installed it, forgot to activate cuz i lazy and wanted to get down to business. it was around 20 days before i realised that i need to activate but in that time i had ALOT of data created however my female roomate through all my papers away. my activation date is now expired and i have bought another opsystem (OEM im cheap). my question is does anybody know of any tricks to get inside of your hard drive without booting into opsystem so i can copy the needed data onto disks so i can transplant them to the new opsystem. now that windows has expired i cant even log in to get the stuff and my roommate trashed my code. im not trying to bypass the activation. like ive said ive already bought another windows. ive tried running my hard drive on my buddies computer as a slave on an IDE cable and try to get to the drive through his computer (going to my computer through his opsystem and clicking on it) but it keeps asking me to format which i do not want to do before i get my new version of windows on. to all you people smarter than me i need your help. im in college and need my comp working asap but dont want to reformat before getting my data back. ANY help is appriciated.

[Fruss Tray Ted]

Get another harddrive, used one if you want, doesn't need to be big if all you want to do is burn off the data with a cd or dvd burner, and install xp onto that. Set it to master and the problem drive set to slave. Put them on the primary ide cable and install burner software onto the small drive and burn what you need prior to rerformatting the expired drive.

When you finish rearrange back to original and make sure you partition the drive and get into the habit of putting your work on a separate partition from the one with your os. Then you won't ever be in a predicament like this again.

Edit:
You could also make a Knoppix cd (Linux) and boot to the CD-ROM and burn your data that way too but you'll need two optical drives. One, at least a reader and the other, a burner.

[Budfred]

I believe you can also call MS and activate the computer over the phone even if you don't have the installation code and that would allow you to use the computer without having to do anything more drastic (like buying another OS)...