Drive letter changes lead to inaccessible data

February 13, 2005 8:30 PM

I have a Windows XP machine, and recently bought a new hard drive now C:, my old drive now D:.

When I go to access my old pictures and documents, D:\Documents and Setting\user, Windows tells me I don't have permissions to access the folder. WTF? How can I access my stuff?

I am using the same name and password.

I feel like buying a Mac this very moment.

posted by Mean Mr. Bucket to Computers & Internet (4 answers total)

Best answer: [lifted from this site]

You can take ownership of these files as follows:
Boot XP-home into Safe Mode (Press F8 a few times when starting up) as an administrator. Now use Explorer to go to the folders etc. on your W2K-drives, right-click them, select Properties, click the Security tab and click OK if a security message pops up. Click Advanced, then Owner tab. In the Name list select your (administrator's) name. Mark the Replace Owner on subcontainers and objects check box. Click OK, Yes and OK.

For taking ownership of files, rightclick them, Security tab, Advanced, Owner tab. In Name list select Administrator or Admin-group and click OK. Click Add and in the "Enter the object...list" type a user or group account or Administrator. Click OK. In the group or user name list, click the account you want (e.g. Administrator), then tick the check boxes for permissions, e.g. Full Control [Allow].

Hope this gets you on your way
posted by null terminated at 8:58 PM on February 13, 2005

(Even though the above says W2k, I had a similiar issue with my drive using XP recently and the instructions I was given sounded exactly like the above, so it might work)
posted by null terminated at 8:59 PM on February 13, 2005

null's advice will work for XP. If you will no longer be booting from the D: drive, you can just get properties on the entire D: drive and take ownership of it, recursively (i.e. Replace Owner of subcontainers).

Also, since you're booting from C, there's no reason to boot into safe mode to accomplish the task.
posted by pmbuko at 10:49 PM on February 13, 2005

Heh. A friend of mine had that problem before. Windows XP dosn't let you access the file-ownership stuff for some unknown reason. You can really shoot yourself with those things, but when you're reinstalling the OS it really fucks things.

We had to take his XP drive out of the computer and plug it into my 2000 machine.

I guess you can access that from safemode, though. I'm really out of practice with computers these days, and proud of it :P
posted by delmoi at 11:38 PM on February 13, 2005