Hard drive crashed, having trouble recovering photos. How can I do this?

Question

My hard drive crahsed a while ago, so I had to buy an external one to hook up to my mac to replace it. After the crash, I used this external hard drive as my new computer. The old hard drive was broken, it wouldn't let you edit or change any files on it, but it let you view all of its contents, and open it. You just couldn't delete, remove, or change anything, it's like a read-only file. All of my photos were on that hard drive, and I found the iPhoto Library, where they were all stored. Like I said, I can open these files on my new hard drive, so that's what I tried to do, but it says that it can't open the Library, because the version of iPhoto I have is a later version than what the iPhoto library is. This is probably because my OS went through many updates on my new hard drive, after the old one broke.
How can I recover these photos on the older iPhoto Library? Right Now, I have iPhoto '08, 7.1.5, so the library i'm trying to open is some version earlier than that, though I don't think I went through many updates, so it's possible it's still '08, just an earlier version.
Does anybody have any advice?

Answer 1

FIrst off it sound like you might have a permissions problem with your old drive - you could try the support forum for your computer to see if anyone there can assist in actually fixing that problem
As to upgrading - each newer version of iPhoto can open (and convert as needed) older versions of the library - so iPhoto '08 version 7.1.5 should be able to open (and convert as needed) any library from iPhoto 1 through iPhoto '08
If the conversion is not working then you have a damaged library and need to load your backup or rebuild the library after backing up - depress the command and option keys and launch iPhoto and rebuild the library
LN