Long story short, I’ve got an old (10 gigs! ooooooh!) hard drive from several years ago I’d like really like to look at again because I think it may have an old file I’ve been trying to find forever.
Apparently, I took sole ownership of the drive or something like that, because it’s got the “NTLDR missing” error, and when I go into the Windows Recovery Console and try to copy NTLDR onto the old drive I get “Access is denied.” (I don’t remember what my profile name was back then, let alone its password)
I’m wondering, is there a bootable OS like Linux that will fit on a 500Mb thumb drive? Would a different OS be able to get around the permissions? I just want to look at my old text files; I don’t need the old drive to boot on its own.
You can’t just put the new drive into a current computer as a slave? But yes, you can fit Puppy Linux, and a few others I’ve forgotten at the moment, onto a flash drive. Keep in mind that flash drives have to specifically formatted to be bootable sometimes, they don’t work exactly like a disc.
They go from an IDE or SATA interface to USB, letting you access your old hard drive basically like a thumb drive. I have also not been as good as I should have been about moving important files over to a string of new computers for the last decade or so, and the above gizmo has at last allowed me to easily access the stuff on all the old drives that have been sitting in my closet.
Covered_In_Bees!: Unfortunately, when I try to put it in as a slave, the drive shows up as empty. I guess it’s the same reason I get access denied. i musta done something pretty funky, messing around with the permissions. … So, will a different OS maybe ignore all that, and just show me the files?
GreasyJack: Wow, that’s really nifty! I MUST get one of those! I do, however, have an external bay … same thing, the drive shows up as empty.
Mount the drive (via USB is easiest). Right Click the drive, select Properties. Select the Security Tab. Hit the Advanced button, select the Owner tab. Change the Ownership to your account, and ensure that the new ownership propagates to sub-folders down the file system.
If this does not help…
the file system is probably hosed, giving the “Access Denied” errors.
A Linux boot may help - the NTFS file system driver in Linux is somewhat more forgiving of errors than the Windows NTFS driver. The Linux one is reverse engineered without access to the FS details, so it has to take a more rigorous approach and skips past things it does not understand. I have had really good results on damaged disks using this. Look for LiveLinux USB boot creator, and use something like Puppy or Trinity Linux.
