Please help me get files off a hard drive

May 13, 2006 5:57 PM

My laptop died. I mounted the hard drive in a USB enclosure. If you can solve permission problems, that would help. If you can solve Mac / PC compatibility problems, that would help. If you can solve both, that would be great!

Permission problems. I'm not the system administrator anywhere I want to use as a surrogate computer until I get a new one, so I have limited permissions. At work, I couldn't get to my documents. Sometime before I could get to Users/MyUserName/My Documents folder, it said "you do not have permission to access this folder." It did show the files saved on C:/. This permission problem existed when I was logged in as myself, but then it went away when the system administrator logged in. Unfortunately, he didn't know anything about changing permissions, so all I did was copy a couple files off -- not the continuous read/write capacity I want. If I can get logged in again as an administrator, how could I change so the files are readable when I'm not? Is there any way to do that now, when I'm not the admin?

So, I brought the hard drive to my friend's house. He has a Mac, running OSX 10.4. But the hard drive is from a Dell PC, running Windows XP home. The hard drive itself is a Western Digital WD800 Scorpio. The enclosure came with a driver disk, but since his computer is one of those suck-the-CD-in types, and this is one of those half-CDs like AOL uses, we can't use it. The hard drive enclosure has a a USB-to-IDE bridge, AU6390.

His computer can't read it. The drive doesn't make much noise, and it said almost immediately that it couldn't read it. The error message is no longer appearing, but it was basically "OSX cannot read this volume. Do you want to format it?" He said no.

Final issue is that it's no longer even giving us the error message, even after a reboot, which is a little frightening. Could somewhere in the jostling, plugging, unplugging, something bad have happened? The green light is still on.

Advice? I'd ideally love to get to my files here and also set up the permissions so I can get to them at work and the computer lab.

posted by salvia to computers & internet (10 comments total)

I don't know how to change permissions in Windows, but I can't imagine it would be that difficult. One thing that will work in the interim is Knoppix — it's not convenient in the long term because you need to reboot to use, but it will read Windows drives and won't care about the permissions. It may be possible to change these permissions through Knoppix as well.
posted by IshmaelGraves at 6:03 PM on May 13, 2006

It's not a matter of permissions. It's a matter of ownership. As I said in the linked answer to the last time this question was asked: Knoppix will work, but taking ownership of the files will work better.
posted by majick at 6:09 PM on May 13, 2006

You can mount the drive via Knoppix and change all the relevant permissions that way. I don't know if WinXP Home has NTFS partitions or FAT32 or what... Last I checked, support for writing to NTFS partitions (the kind of partition that, for example, Windows 2000 would use) via Knoppix was iffy, but with 10.4 and a USB bridge, you're in luck.

There is NTFS read support (and certainly FAT32, etc.—but if it were FAT32, I imagine that your friend's Mac would have mounted it without complaint) available in OS X. If you search VersionTracker, you'll find recovery utilities. If you go here, you'll find a utility to access NTFS partitions, read-only.

If your drive isn't NTFS and changing permissions really is the way to go, Knoppix will certainly get the job done. But I wonder then why OS X wouldn't read the drive as-is. It can read FAT32 (the other common Windows format) without complaints.

The Knoppix thing is a bit more involved, so unless your google-fu produces a Knoppix (or Ubuntu, or whatever) guide on recovering your WinXP setup from an external hard drive, this thread is going to have to get a lot longer...
posted by Yeomans at 6:20 PM on May 13, 2006

Thanks, majick. That article will help when I'm back on an XP machine during working hours, but any tips in the meantime? I'm surrounded by a bunch of Mac users, and these machines (I've tried two now) can't even see the files on the drive. I have a Monday deadline...

We think the files are NTFS, but that's just from a Google search.
posted by salvia at 6:22 PM on May 13, 2006

Looks like Knoppix won't work on Mac OS X and costs money?
posted by salvia at 6:30 PM on May 13, 2006

knoppix is free, modulo the cost of downloading it and a blank cd-r.

the usb enclosure really should not need drivers. if the mac can't see the disk, it's most likely because it is ntfs and not fat32.

you could try a different linux livecd such as ubuntu/kubuntu. which has a version which will run on powerpc. and which will have the stable read-only ntfs driver. and which will have usb mass storage support.

alternately, you don't have to be a system administrator on a pc just to boot up a livecd on it (altho it's conceivable the bios is password-protected or otherwise won't let you boot a bootable cd...) so burn a knoppix or kanotix or kubuntu livecd and try it on a machine at work.
posted by dorian at 7:02 PM on May 13, 2006

Hmmm, I tried the "taking ownership" method, and it still isn't working when I switch to a limited-rights user. Maybe I'm messing something up, but I tried twice....
posted by salvia at 10:16 PM on May 13, 2006

I dunno if this will help but if you have a mac user around with one of the new intel macs, it *should* be able to read the volume on your drive. my macintel can read both volumes of my drive partition; the osx and the xp. the windows side cannot (which just proves how retarded windows is but I digress).

whether or not you can *use* those files on the mac, tho is another story. that would depend upon the files being in a format that the applications on osx can use; i.e. stuff in 'global' formats like mp3s and .jpg photos, no prob. document files and excel spreadsheets... might get a little trickier. it just depends on the applications the mac user is running.
posted by lonefrontranger at 11:25 PM on May 13, 2006

If you're getting Access Denied messages from a filesystem attached to a Windows XP PC, it's definitely an NTFS filesystem and not a FAT32 one.

If you can get logged on as an administrator again, you can make your files readable as follows:

1. Right-click on the folder you want to make readable (probably [letter]:\Documents and Settings\[username]\My Documents) and select Properties.

2. Click the Security tab. If you don't have a Security tab: close down the Properties sheet, open any folder on any drive with Windows Explorer, select Tools->Folder Options->View, scroll down to the bottom and turn off Simple File Sharing; then return to step 1.

3. Click Advanced. This will bring up the Advanced Security Settings dialog box.

4. Click the Owner tab.

5. Click the line for the Administrators group, check "Replace owner on subcontainers and objects", and click OK. If you're asked about replacing existing permissions with ones giving you Full Control, click Yes.

6. The Advanced Security Properties box should disappear, leaving you looking at Security tab on the original Properties sheet again. Click Add. This will bring up the "Select Users, Computer or Groups" dialog.

7. Under "Enter the object names to select", type Everyone and click OK. You should see that Everyone has been added to the list of users and groups.

8. Click Advanced again to get the Advanced Security Settings dialog box back.

9. Check "Replace permission entries on all child objects with entries shown here that apply to child objects" and click OK.

10. Click OK.

You should now be able to read all the files in that folder and all its subfolders regardless of which computer you're using or who you're logged on as.

If you want to be able to change files as well as read them: at step 7a, click Everyone to highlight it, then check the "Full Control" box in the bottom section..

If you want to remove all security restrictions from every file on that disk, select the entire disk in step 1, and do step 7a as well.
posted by flabdablet at 5:10 PM on May 14, 2006

Oh, yeah. If you've got a sysadmin who doesn't understand NTFS file permissions, you need a new sysadmin.
posted by flabdablet at 5:27 PM on May 14, 2006