Community archive

Ask something
Discussion Locked

Accessing Documents and Settings :(

0 helpful
2 replies

by lostthelead

Closed to new repliesThis discussion is closed. It stays readable, but it takes no new replies.

Guys, I need some help.

A few months ago my hard computer went wrong and I could no longer boot off the Hard drive.
In a desperate bid to recover the contents off my HDD I placed my CORRUPTED? one into my mates machine. He is running XP PRO, so i used his hard disk to get into windows then I could see my drive and access much of its content. Sadly, ALL of the content I really want is in Documents and Settings/USERNAME/Desktop etc, but when I try to get into here it says ACCESS DENIED.

Can anyone please please help? I am desperate to obtain a few documents off here.
All I did was place my UNBOOTABLE drive into a spare socket on my mates motherboard and read the content from his windows.
I heard something about slave settings?
I do not know much, so is there something I need to do?

My theory is that there must be some sort of permissions thing on there. I was ADMIN on my old account and I still remember the password.

If anyone can help it would be great thanks!

James

2 replies

by hal 9000

As you didn't say which version of Windows you where running in the first place but under XP everything that was not created by the user and is added via a second HDD is locked to the original users account and even if you fit the "Boot" drive as a slave drive you will be unable to access the data as Windows seems to think that even with Admin privileges it is not valid/appropriate data that you are trying to recover.

It is singed by whatever version of Windows that you where using and given a unique identification number and if it isn't accessed on the original load of the OS it is unreadable unless you are prepared to send the drive away to a data recovery business to recover the data.

Sorry that I couldn't be more helpful here but I have a similar problem with an old boot drive with 10 GIG of stored E-Mails that are unreadable.

Microsoft's answer was to send the drive to a recovery company to recover the data which I'll do if there are any legal problems that arise form an e-mail that was supposed to be sent from here but otherwise it is just wasted space on a now stored HDD.

Col

by don_c

If your buddy is runing pro and using NTFS the copy the folder to a NTFS volume and change permission to take ownership then recover the files

Not to be rude but Q&A would be nice

This discussion is closed to new replies.