Urgent Help required please!!

[phill9800]

Hi guys...

I'm in need of some help here!!

A friend brought over his PC last night. His hard drive wont boot into windows but its still working. But I cant access his 'My Documents' Folder as he used to have a user/password system on it. It comes up, access is denied.

He has all his files that are needed to save before I format the drive (as it doesnt boot due to a DLL file or something) but I NEED the files from it before I do it. He never made a backup of them either :(

If I where to reinstall windows (over the top) would I be able to to gain access to his files that way? Is there anyway I can save those files in his My doc's folder?
I would like to 'ghost' the drive just so if anything does happen he still has whatever is on it, but sadly my Ghost program (Norton) seems to not be installing and I dont know of any others to try?
When I clicked the properties on the folder, it was coming up, 0 folders/files, is that because of the access limitations on it?

Is there a way to gain the access of his my doc's folder or is everything lost forever or what?!

I need some speedy help guys!! Please come to my rescue!!

[Rudegar]

i would make sure i was admin on the pc
and see if i could remove his ownership of the dirs

[therealwesty]

So long as the files aren't encrypted using the EFS built into WindowsXP you should be able to access them by assuming ownership. You'll need to be logged on as an administrator, either on your friends system, or with his hard drive connected to another system as slave.

Steps for assuming ownership of the file are here. (http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=308421)

[PCgeek]

The other way that can it can be done is if you have a spare hard drive, download NTFS4DOS here: http://www.wsdownload.de/download/ntfs4dos/ntfsinst.exe

This will allow you to make a DOS boot disk that will read an NTFS hard drive, and at this point windows ownership should not matter since you're in DOS, so you can simply copy files over.

EDIT - If you ever need a bootdisk just go to http://bootdisk.com/ If they don't have the disk you're looking for they have a link to whomever does.

[phill9800]

I dont know how to remove the ownership, but on his drive it just wont boot into Windows anyways.

I have got most of the files off of the drive and I was considering to go into dos and having just tried it and remembered that dos doesnt read NTFS, then that was my next step!
I'm always logged on as Admin as I dont password or have a multi-user system... It makes life a lot easier :D

How do I assume ownership Westy?

Thanks for the links PCGeek, I will try them as I would have thought they would be the easiest way to do it :) ;)

[phill9800]

Hi all :)

I can offically get into the drive with no problems at all. My only problem is, when I use the copy command in dos, its only copying one file at a time, even with the wild cards. What is wrong with it?!
I thought if you where trying to copy something that had the same file name extension, you could copy the lot over at once with something like this:

D:\copy *.jpg G:

for example...

I still would like to know how I can get into his My Doc's folder etc, as dragging and dropping a few hundred files would certainly be a lot easier than copying them one by one in dos :D Its just coming up, access denied... Anyone got any ideas?

[therealwesty]

Did you try taking over ownership of the files? That has always worked for me in the past. Should give you access to the My Documents folder as you'd normally expect.

[Rudegar]

an easy way is to take out the disk and connect it to a working pc where you have administrator

[phill9800]

I'm always administrator and that didnt seem to work for me in this case... Just kept coming up, Access Denied :(

Managed to get around it by installing Get Data Back and getting the needed files over that way :) Works a treat now as its now been reinstalled and its running fine :)

I'd just like to say thank you to all those that helped!!

How would I take ownership for future reference?

[NotMyBest2Day]

When you've got his drive in your computer as a slave, open up My Computer and right-click on his drive, and go to properties > security, and you'll need to do Add... and then go in there and scroll down a little and find Administrator (in folder) [computer name].

Of course, that's what you do on 2000. I vaguely remember XP Pro being very similar, and Home just sucks. My brother had an issue with his drive not working in another rig, just like this one, and that's the steps I went through to gain access to it once again.

[phill9800]

Many thanks for that mate :) I was trying it on the folder and there was no security tab!! :lol:

[phill9800]

I dont seem to have a Security 'tab' on any of my drives... I have service pack 2 if that makes any difference....

[therealwesty]

I linked the steps in my previous posts.

[JoshKorn12]

Another way would have been to convert the drive to FAT32, which i have done before when I had the same exact thing happen to my hard drive.

The above options work too.

[NotMyBest2Day]

You can't convert NTFS to FAT32 without losing your data. FAT32 to NTFS works though.

[stlouis1]

well, windows cant convert ntfs to fat32, you need third party tools for that. ie partition magic. and you dont lose data from doing that if you do it properly/safely running chkdsk /r first, the only thing you lose are the extra attributes.

when it comes to taking ownership of files though or getting access to them. windows xp pro has more security options in the properties dialogs than xp home which displays some of them in safe mode.

i did find an interesting page a while ago when i had the same issue with a customer on the phone. that page can be found here (http://www.dougknox.com/xp/tips/xp_home_sectab.htm)

now, if you did something stupid like format a primary partition leaving files encrypted with EFS on another partition. there's a program called EFSkey that can help with that, all you need is the password from the user account the were encrypted with, has to be the password used at the time of encryption. its not exactly userfriendly, but it works

i also had the name of another program here somewhere that could bypass access denied issues and other problems like that, im trying to find it again so i can post it

[Greevous]

I have a problem similar to this: I had permissions and ownership and all that set up on my external hard drive on my old computer, but now on this new computer I have different user names and now the old owners (who used to own most of the stuff on my drive with explicit permissions) don't exist anymore.

Will deleting these users from the Security settings erase everything that they own as well? I think it is creating problems with me trying to do certain things in each directory such as creating files, creating folders, or pasting to it. Thanks in advance.

[NotMyBest2Day]

If you remember the old usernames and passwords, or even just one, you could very well just make that user once again, go in and have that user change the ownership.

In most cases, Administrator, or anyone that has the admin. attribute as a user-level should be able to access/modify/change ownership of these files and directories.

I don't believe removing the old users from the old HDD will damage anything since administrators can access it still, but it wouldn't hurt to possibly add 'everyone' or 'Administrators ([computer name]\Administrators)' and even 'Users ([computer name]\Users' to the list, too. This will probably have to be done by an Administrator though.

Simply deleting the users won't erase anything that belonged to them. It will just remove that user from the access permissions, and admins. can still access everything.

[Greevous]

Alright. Thanks for your help.:thumb: