vista help?

[sammy004]

Hi again guys, I had a laptop that someone brought over for me to fix, it needs to be reformated because a file is corrupted for some reason or something. The customer wanted to get the information off of the hard drive and the only way for me to take off the information is to hook it up to an external adapter and get the files off, however I can see all the files in that harddrive except the documents (My Pictures, My Music). I had the same issue before when I try to take the information off of a computer, and I ended up telling the person that maybe you didn't have anything on there when he really did. So can anyone tell me how I can access these files or is there a way to that where XP will not read Vista doucument files?

[jdrom17]

Well if the user has a password on their account in Vista, then I doubt your going to get access to the documents folder. If it's possible, you'll probably need some 3rd party software.

Are you sure your looking in the right place? (C:\Users\Username\).

You could try doing a repair install through the Vista installer (Boot from the DVD) to see if it could fix it before reformatting.

[sammy004]

do you know of any third party software, I don't even know what to call this or what to type in google.

[jdrom17]

I actually have no idea if anything exists or what to call it either.

Are you plugging the drive into an XP computer?

There may be a way, but it'll take some explaining, so I need to know which OS your on.

[JoshKorn12]

There are ways around the security policies. I know at best Buy we have a special program that was written in-house for just this practice. It allows us to access anyon's files password or no password.

Many flavors of linux will do the same thing. I'd suggest running Damn Small Linux (http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/). That should be able to ignore the policies.

[jdrom17]

What I was thinking about was changing the files permissions on all the contents of the drive. I think that may also lift/remove any security polices.

[stlouis1]

cacls.exe "drive:\" /t /e /c /g everyone:f

thatll reset the folder permissions. probly what you're problem is, is that you're account isnt allowed to list the folder contents. that'll command should fix it

here's some info on it. but its part of windows, you shouldnt need any other software
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cacls

also, as mentioned earlier, make sure you're looking in the users folder and not documents and settings

[sammy004]

so I just enter this in the comand line (DOS) and I should be able to see the content in the folder?

[stlouis1]

yeah, we do it on zune all the time when the install crashes because it can't make a zune folder in all users.

this is what we use

cacls.exe "%allusersprofile%" /t /e /c /g everyone:f

%allusersprofile% being in our case a variable pointing to "c:\documents and settings\all users" on most machines.

in you case if you did this

cacls.exe "letter:\documents and settings\all users" /t /e /c /g everyone:f

that should fix it for you




you could also boot the vista DVD and use the recovery console from there to manually copy the files to another drive, but that would be a longer process