My PC’s power unit went out last week. I had already been considering buying a new machine, so this finalized the decision for me. I brought home a new PC, took the hard drive out of the old unit and installed it as a slave drive in the new unit. The new PC succesfully detects and reads the salvaged (slave) drive. But it doesn’t allow me to access any files that were residing in the My Documents folder on my old machine.
I can access most files on the old drive, but when I try to access the folder E:\Documents and Settings\Patrick, it gives me an Access Denied message. Though I can access files in these folders.
[ul]
[li]E:\Documents and Settings\Administrator[/li][li]E:\Documents and Settings\All Users[/li][li]E:\Documents and Settings\Default User[/li][/ul]
When I check the properties of E:\Documents and Settings\Patrick, it lists it as 0 bytes, 0 files, 0 folders.
The operating system on the new unit is Windows XP, as it was on the old machine. My user name (Patrick) is the Administrator on the new machine, as it was on the old machine. But I get the impression the Patrick folder on the old drive don’t accept me as Patrick when accessing files on the now slave drive. (I don’t know a lot about access permission in Windows XP, so that’s just a guess).
I’ve tried two things:
Accessing files via the Command Prompt, but the Command Prompt reads the Patrick folder as empty as well. (I assume that’s due to the same access permissions in Windows, as I’m running the Command Prompt through Windows.)
I rewired the IDE so that my old drive was now considered the master drive and the new drive was not even being read (with the intention of copying all necessary files out of My Directory to another directory on the c-drive that I could read once I rewired the drives and the old drive became the slave drive again–the jumper set-up on the old drive is “content detect,” so I have not messed with those at all). But the computer didn’t even detect Windows on the old drive, so I got no where there. I couldn’t even run safe mode.
To finally get to my question: Is it possible to some how salvage these files in the My Documents folder off my old machine? All of the 1s and 0s should still be there, even though the new machine isn’t detecting them under the present set-up. I just need to find a way to move them all to my new drive.
I’m no windows expert. They will be along shortly, I’m sure.
But until then, a couple things come to mind:
If Patrick is the administrator account of the active boot environment, is it possible to change the ownership/permissions of the folders on the slave drive to Patrick? I know you said they were both owned by Patrick, but I don’t know if the Windows administrator account is as analagous to the Unix root the two admin accounts named the same thing would share a numerical user id. Doin the Windows version of a chown Patrick <directory> might set the UID correctly.
If changing the owner of the files is just plain silly, what about changing the permissions to wide open read/write/execute? When you say you can access files within the directories but you can’t list the contents of the directory, it brings to mind a common scenario:
You have read permission for a file within a directory, but you do not have read permission for the directory. In this scenario, you can access the file using the full pathname. But since you can’t read the directory, you can’t do a list of it (read it’s contents). A bad analogy is you can go to the library and get the book of the shelf yourself if you know where it is, but you aren’t allowed to use the card catalog.
Changing the permission of the directory to world-wide readable may help.
So, my attempt at help is:
Change the ownership of this directories and their contents, even though they seem to be owned by the same person.
Change the permissions of the directories to readable by others. If you can access a file but not list the directory, you’ve got yourself a permissions problem at the directory level.
THanks for your comments leenmi, but I believe I may not have been clear in my OP.
I cannot access the files within the directory. I’m sorry if I gave you that impression. Even though I boot up as Administrator (no one else uses this PC, so I have no other accounts, and I don’t use a password for my account), I still don’t have access to the contents of the folder. I cannot view the contents at all (the properties tell me the folder is empty).
I really don’t know they are there. I’m only assuming they are there because they were there before the power unit on the old PC bit the dust. I’m interpretting the “0 files in the folder” message as “as far as you’re concerned, buddy, there are no files here to look at” not as “oops, all the files done gone bye-bye.”
I don’t know if there is an analogous way to change read/write/execute permissions in Windows as there is in Unix. When I do a dir listing in Command Prompt, it doesn’t list that type of info the same way the Unix ls command does. If that is possible, I hope some one can come along and tell me how to do that.
You seem familiar with Unix. My experience with Windows filesystems has been that the best way to deal with them is to stick the drive in a Linux machine and mount it, thereby bypassing all the obnoxious Windows security features.
Thanks, friedo. I don’t have immediate access to Linux box, but I’ll ask around. That solution will be fine with me if I can find some one to help me out.
In the meantime, I’m still fielding Windows-based answers if anyone else has a suggestion.
There are also a variety of tools out there that will let you cut through the security and recover your data. Probably some simple Linux boot disk that will allow you to reset security, or get a Knoppix CD and boot from that. It does not write anything to your hard drive so you can just throw it in the CD and boot up, runs right from the CD and most distros have a wide variety of data recovery tools onhand (since that’s one of the handy uses for an OS running soley from the CD).
Right-click the folder and choose Properties. Click on the Security tab, then the Advanced button, then the Owner tab.
Change the owner to your admin account on the new machine, reset ownership on all child objects, then try and change the security to the admin account on your new machine.
Thanks, Valgard. I tried the NTFSDOD boot disk. It worked in that it allowed me to actually read what is inside of the Patrick folder, so I have confirmed the files are still there. But I get an Access Denied message even in DOS, which I don’t understand. Does anyone know if you can modify DOS permissions in a way similar to Unix permissions?
I started copying down the Knoppix file as you suggested, but it took so long to download that I haven’t tried burning it yet. Plus, I had to download three files of a Nero program (which I had never heard of before) in order to burn the file to CD. But I have a question here:
Will my PC automatically read that the Knoppix CD is a boot disc? Or do I need to change some settings first? Whenever I leave a disc (such as a music CD) in my CD-ROM when shutting down, my PCs boots up fine without complaining about there being a disk in the d-drive (unlike the a-drive, where it complains if anything is in there other than a boot-up disk). Does the system always detect whats on the CD-ROM before launching Windows, and in my case, always ignores everything because it’s not a boot disk?
Or are there additional steps I must perform in order to get the system to process the contents of the boot disk instead of launching Windows?
By the way, when I right click on the folder and select Properties, I don’t have a Security tab. Just General, Sharing, and Customize. Maybe my default login on my new PC doesn’t have true Administrative powers (though it calls me Administrator when I check Control Panel > Users.
When I get home tonight, I’ll try logging in in Safe Mode as Admin and see if it shows up then.
Number has the right of it. There’s one caveat: if you’ve been using the Encrypted File System, put your disk back in the old system and plumb in the new PSU and take everything out of EFS.
This option does not appear in my Tools > Folder Options > View choices on my home PC. I do have the option at work. Both use Windows XP. The one here at home is, of course, the Home Edition. I don’t know the edition on my work PC.
Regardless, I was able to take Valgard’s advice:
I just had to do it from safe mode. Apparently permissions settings are different in Safe mode than in Normal mode. In Normal mode, there is only one user listed in Control Panel > User Accounts: “Patrick” (me), and I am listed as Administrator. I can add or modify accounts throught the User Accounts tool. But I still couldn’t access the files in the Patrick folder.
But when I log in using Safe mode, it lists two accounts: “Patrick” and “Adminstrator.” When I choose the Adminsitrator option in Safe mode, it allowed me to change the folder and file permissions so that I could see the contents of my folder and move them to the master drive.
I have my files back! Yeah!
Thanks again, all! Just more proof that the SDMB is a vast tundra of knowledge! tundra
