The predicament:
Wifes’ HP laptop will not turn on due to electrical failure (not from a surge). She needs the data on her hard drive recovered. Hard drive is healthy.
The Problem:
1) I tried replacing my HP laptop hard drive with hers, but the laptop would not accept it due too “configuration incompatibility” or in another words, windows and the hard drive is configured for her specific HP laptop and will not work with my HP laptop (unless I format the hard drive and start from scratch, thus defeating the whole point of trying to recover data).
2) I purchased a USB hard drive enclosure and placed her laptop hard drive inside. Then I was able top see the hard drive contents. I entered the “Documents and Settings” folder and was able to recover the desktop files and the my documents data from both my children’s profiles (they used the laptop also), but I could not access my wifes My Documents nor her Desktop files or her Briefcase.
When I enter F:\Documents and Settings\Wife\
I cannot open the folders inside of her profile because it keeps telling me “access denied.”
My conclusions:
I think that maybe I cannot get into her files because of write protection, or she is the Administrator, or maybe because she had a password on her profile when she had Windows XP up and running on her laptop. Either way, all I am trying to do is save her data from My Documents, her Desktop, and her Briefcase so that I can reformat the hard drive and place it in my laptop and then she can have my laptop for her University homework without losing all the important stuff she has on the hard drive originally.
The Question:
Does anyone know how I can be successful in recovering her data? Is there someway to import her profile maybe onto my PC so that she can just login from my PC? Any useful suggestions will be most appreciated.