Booting from SATA drive connected to USB adapter

[j9andahalf]

I previously posted in windows 2k/xp subforum about my mother's laptop. We figured out that her laptop's video card is toast.

Anyway, she has classified stuff on her hard drive for her job (I already backed it up onto an external hard drive using Norton Ghost) that she doesn't want HP to see when she sends in the laptop for repairs. I need to figure out how to recover her hard drive either using the recovery partition of the hard drive or using the recovery DVDs. If I attempt to use the recovery DVDs, it will just tell me that they are incompatible with the PC that I am using so that seems like it is out of the question. It seems also that the only way that I could use the recovery partition is if I have the drive set as the primary drive and I boot from that. It's a SATA hard drive so I can't just set it as a master drive on an IDE channel.

Right now, the drive is hooked up to my laptop via a SATA to USB 2.0 adapter. Though there is an option in my BIOS to boot from a USB hard drive, it's not working and I need to find out some way to restore the drive to the original factory state. I am also not sure if a drive hooked up through a USB adapter counts as a USB hard drive. My BIOS is up-to-date as well. My laptop is an HP DV6338se.

Does anyone have any ideas? Please let me know.