I have a Debian etch system I haven't fired up for about a year because the mobo went bad.

I had one user setup, I hammered it with all my normal passwords and finally got a prompt that said 'Access Denied'

So my understanding is that I figured out my PW, but for some reason this user doesn't have access anymore.

Is there a workaround for this? I am just trying to retrieve some files from the drive I don't have a problem formatting it.

Also I tried hooking it up to a windows machine:

I loaded Ext2 IFS, it recognizes the drive, but says it can't load it - something to do with the headers being closed out improperly, and basically said I would have to boot it in linux then try it in windows.

I tried this after I got to the linux logon prompt (the bootloader had scanned the drive because it hadn't been scanned for x amount of days), this didn't help Ext IFS read the drive.

Any suggestions?

Login as a single user and change the users password.

When the machine boots you can interrupt the countdown and edit the kernel parameters.
add a space then 1 to the end of the line .
this boots the computer into console mode as root.
the command
allows you to set the password for <username>

http://unixhelp.ed.ac.uk/CGI/man-cgi?passwd

Once done, reboot the computer and log in as the user.