Currently I have a 120GB hard drive with Windows XP Home installed. I’m home for the weekend and I brought the hard drive with me because I have Microsoft Visual Studio.NET on it and don’t have the disks to install it on the computer I’m on now. I tried just swapping out hard drives but Windows XP doesn’t like when you change every hardware setting all at once. So I tried booting to the main hard drive and setting my 120GB one to slave. I have access to the MVS.NET files but can’t open it because of the registry keys and such. Another problem that I have is that all of my stuff on my XP account is password protected and it won’t let me get into any of my documents or personal files. Does anyone have ANY suggestions as to what I can do to get this to work??? Thanks in advance.
There’s not much you can do. You will not be able to run the software from the other drive without reinstalling it.
As to your personal files, an administrator can get around permissions (the machine administrator has full power to set ACLs on anything on the computer), so you should be able to access your files by changing the permissions on them while logged in as an administrator of the machine. However, if they are encrypted, then you’re totally SOL without the encryption keys. These can sometimes be recovered, but doing so is not easy.
What are you going to do about your MS activation License which is set only for the machine specs that you originally put it on?
What you’re doing seems a bit risky at best but maybe astro or sailor have a better idea what to do.