copy files from dying hard drive - permissions?

Hi all.

A friend of mine dropped her laptop the other week and the spinning wheel came up. I opened it up and swapped HDDs and indeed it's her hard drive as mine works fine in her macbook. She's ordered a SSD to replace it, but I am trying to recover the data from her HDD. I have put the drive in a caddy and have it plugged into my macbook pro (2011, mountain lion) - the drive is still working, and so far has not shown any corrupted files. Dragging and dropping files is slow, but so far effective. However, some files won't copy due to 'permissions' - such as her iphoto library which she really wants off there. I have tried 'get info' but I am unsure if i need my login details or hers? I've tried mine but the box to add/change permissions is still greyed out even with it unlocked. Even then, some of these files say 'read and write' so I'm not sure why they are flagging up like this. Is this a way a hard drive can begin to fail, or is it because I'm trying to copy over files she may have set with diff permissions?

Only other thing i can think of is that I use a much older OSX (for driver reasons) and perhaps can't access her iphoto? I don't use iphoto muself so is there a way i can open it up into a file directory rather than one single link?

Thanks again!