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Cannot See Domain User's Document Folder on Hard Drive

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by atltek

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My client's Vista Ultimate went screwy and I'm simply trying to copy the Documents folder from his domain user account from the hard drive to a new installation of Vista on a different hard drive. When I connect the old hard drive, I can see the contents of the drive. But, I cannot located the domain user's folders under "old drive":\Users\ folder. It only has the default profile that came on the PC.
How do I access these folders? I need the domain user's Desktop and Documents. Windows will not boot, will not repair install, and the SMART scan set off a warning of drive failure.

Thanks for any suggestions.
-Stevens

9 replies

by rob miners

drive was in a Domain environment the Users documents are probably still on the File Server. You would need to connect back to the Domain to retrieve the documents.

by nimmo

Been that you are getting a warning about drive failure you may find that some sectors have already died rendering the information on them corrupt and unreadable.

I have a feeling that this is the case because you say you can't see the domain profile under the users section, and the only real way to remove this is to manually delete it.

Ask the user if they kept any 'work' material on the local PC or if they save their data into the network drives.

There are a lot of utilities out on the internet that you can use to recover deleted data but I don't think they will help if it's because the sectors are unreadable.

Don't suppose that the users have roaming profiles?

by atltek

I actually checked the user's folder on the server and he never put anything in it, and it is not a roaming profile. The data was stored locally under his domain user profile on the PC. I see a folder located at \Users\username, but it doesn't have a Desktop or Documents folder. I don't even know if this folder was created by the user before joining the domain.
I've started a scan for deleted items using Active@ Undelete. Wish me luck.

by sue t

the local administrator and see if you can see the folders. I am assuming you are connecting this hard drive to another computer to do this and it would be helpful if both of the computers are using the same administrator name and password. Also, did this person have administrator rights and possibly the folder is marked private? You could also try booting to a live CD and seeing if you can access the data that way.
Good luck.

by soldierjedi

The \users is Vista's version of C:\Documents and Settings from XP. you should be able to see folders in there such as Application Data, Local Settings, Documents etc.

If they're not showing, it may be, as suggested, as a result of corruption on the HDD, or it could be an NTFS security/permissions issue. If the new build does not have the correct security identifiers, you may not be able to access that folder.

Do you have access to a Unix/Linux machine which could bypass the NTFS permissions to allow access to the folders of the old drive?

by atltek

Yes, the folder is not visible. I will try to open it with Linux when this undelete scan completes.

by nimmo

Use the following commands to mount the XP drive.

make a mount point:
mkdir /mnt/winXP

Identify the device:

fdisk -l to find the drive, it should be someting like /dev/hda1 or /dev/sda1.

mount the device:

example - mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/winXP

by atltek

Thanks, but I even took ownership of the Users folder and cannot see the domain account.

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