mcs328

A co-worker of mine called me to say her hard drive on a Dell she bought last year died. It said Primary HD failure. The good thing is that it can boot to the C: prompt and some config file got corrupted. She called Dell and they will replace her HD but they ask for the old one back and she needs to give the old HD back to Dell. I've hooked up her old HD to a working computer using a USB 2.0 enclosure and can see the contents of her HD.

Now here's the gotcha part. She had 3 people use her computer. I saved everybody's else stuff except for her because when she logs on to XP she requires a password. I've rebooted in safe mode so I can at least see the contents of her user - my documents folder but I can't open the file or move the files t a flash drive. What I've managed to do is use XP's backup function and create a .bkf file of her folders onto another HD. Once her HD gets replaced and she moved this .bkf file to the new HD will she be able to access her files again? I tried doing it on my HD but I couldn't open the files and not I can't delete the folder anymore.

Any suggestions?

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Jeffbx

You need to take ownership of the files in XP.

With the drive connected to another PC, make sure you're logged in with an account that has full admin rights on the machine.

Go to the flaky drive in explorer, right click on the folder where her files are stored, and choose Properties. Click the security tab, and you should see the names of the accounts with access to the files. Since it's from a different machine, you'll probably see a few 'unknown accounts' in there.

Click 'advanced' to bring up 'advanced security settings for (folder name)'.

Click on the Owner tab, and then in the window that comes up, look for where it says 'Change Owner To'. In that box, highlight the name of the account you're logged on with, check the 'Replace owner on subcontainers...' box, and then click OK all the way out.

When it's done replacing ownership properties, you'll probably still need to give yourself permission to the files. Right click on the folder again & choose Properties, and then the security tab. This time click 'Add' under the 'Group or user names' box, and add the name of the account you're logged on with. OK all the way out, and you should now have full access to all of the files.

If there's more than one folder, repeat for as many as she has or you can even do this on the entire drive from the root. However, that may take a long time, and could possibly error out on whatever bad sectors she has, so I wouldn't recommend it.