Old hard drive, files are loHcked to original XP account...

meatflower

I have a hard drive from a friends dead Dell, which is completely non-working now. We hooked it up to my Windows 7 box to transfer his data and get it on to his new computer, but Windows is throwing up errors about permissions and that access is denied.

Everything under the Security tab is locked out, so I can't modify the permissions at all. Tried making a user account on this computer with his old username/password, didn't make a difference.

Anyway around this or are his files locked forever?

bigwah

meatflower wrote: »

I have a hard drive from a friends dead Dell, which is completely non-working now. We hooked it up to my Windows 7 box to transfer his data and get it on to his new computer, but Windows is throwing up errors about permissions and that access is denied.

Everything under the Security tab is locked out, so I can't modify the permissions at all. Tried making a user account on this computer with his old username/password, didn't make a difference.

Anyway around this or are his files locked forever?

Remaking the account doesnt matter because the SID is different. Try a live Ubuntu disk.

Tofystedeth

Right click on the hard drive. Not the folders contained therein, but the harddrive itself. Go to Properties -> Security -> Advanced -> Owner.

Change the owner of all files and sub-folders to the new user account or administrator on this computer. This could take a while depening on how many files there are. You should be able to copy them over after that. Even if you can't change permissions on the folders, you should be able to do this owner change as long as you are logged in as an admin and do it over the entire harddrive.

meatflower

"Access is denied" when applying the new security permissions to the drive.

I'm gonna have to try Live Ubuntu.

FyreWulff

If he turned on profile encryption, all files under his profile are gone unless you boot off that HDD, log into his profile, and move all the files out to C:

xzzy

Keep in mind you have to adjust ownership with the Administrator account. Doesn't Windows 7 have you log in as non-administrator?

Microsoft has a KB article for XP:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/308421

The information might still be useful for W7. I've had to do this in the past, and it worked just fine.. under XP at least.

tsmvengy

I would just try hooking the drive up as a boot drive and booting and logging into the account, then copying files from there.

It might work well enough to copy stuff.

Tofystedeth

He won't be able to boot from it without doing a ton of work since it's in a different system. Unless the new box has the same mobo/cpu it's gonna just error out on him.

edit: But yeah, if those files were encrypted via XPs encryption,then you're out of luck unless you can actually log him to that XP install.

FyreWulff

safe mode should be just fine

meatflower

xzzy wrote: »

Keep in mind you have to adjust ownership with the Administrator account. Doesn't Windows 7 have you log in as non-administrator?

Microsoft has a KB article for XP:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/308421

The information might still be useful for W7. I've had to do this in the past, and it worked just fine.. under XP at least.

Actually this did the trick. I was missing the subfolders checkbox before.

Also, W7 does default the first account to Administrator.

Thanks!

GPIA7R

I had this exact issue a while back. Yep, the "hidden Administrator" account typically is enough to override the permissions. Usually takes a while, though, to apply the user to the files.

But, had I known, I think a live Linux distro would also get the job done.

Congrats, glad you were able to get your files.