Comments on: How can I get my protected files back?

Question: How can I get my protected files back?

borkingchikapa — Sat, 16 Sep 2006 11:08:25 -0800

My motherboard died, and now I need to hook the harddrives up to another PC to get the data off. Problem: Some of it was in the "My Documents" folder, and I can't get to it without being logged on to an admin account. I have no way of doing that, since I can't boot from the old windows installation anymore.

Is there some trick or program that will let me into the protected files on my old account? They're clearly there, as everything else on the HD is, but it yells at me about privileges when I try to get to them. We're talking about XP here, if it matters.

By: jedrek

jedrek — Sat, 16 Sep 2006 11:14:35 -0800

This is one of many, many solutions: Get Knoppix, burn a LiveCD and copy your stuff to another disk.

By: unexpected

unexpected — Sat, 16 Sep 2006 11:18:43 -0800

you should be able to swap out the old PC boot hard drive and the new PC boot hard drive and boot from the old one.

Alternatively, if you're putting them in enclosures, if your new PC is relatively new, you can try booting from the USB drive.

Finally, if you still want to do what you want to do, try using Knoppix. Knoppix is a Linux Live CD that'll boot up on the new CD, and recognize the old old drives, and will let you browse them/copy them/ do whatever.

The only caveats: you'll have to boot from your CD-drive, (which is just a bios setting change) and Knoppix (at least, the last time I used it) doesn't like writing to NTFS formatted drives, so have a USB memory stick handy to save all your work to.

By: ed\26h

ed\26h — Sat, 16 Sep 2006 11:32:19 -0800

Not sure I've understood the question correctly, but if I have you may just need to take ownership of the folder.

By: insomnus

insomnus — Sat, 16 Sep 2006 16:13:32 -0800

Yeah, taking ownership would work, unless the data is encrypted.