I had a laptop, after it suffered some a motherboard failure I whipped out the hard drive and sold what remained of the machine on Ebay. So far so good, except that I can’t seem to access the “Administrator” folder within the old “My Documents” folder. I have it in a USB caddy so I can have a look at what remains within. Double clicking brings up an access denied message.
There were some shenanigans with a firm that thought it could repair the machine and they moved some folders around on the drive, to the effect that I’m not sure if my old documents are in this folder. It’s listed as being completely empty, 0 bytes, 0 folders. I’m not sure if this is because it’s locked for only an administrator to open or if it really is completely devoid of any data.
What OS was the drive? If it’s Windows XP or Vista, it’s better to be running the same or later on the box you’re using to access the drive via USB. That is, if the old box was XP, you should be OK if the new box is either XP or Vista, but if the old box was Vista, you could have problems if your new box is only XP.
Even though you can’t access the folder currently, if the user you’re using on the new box is an administrator, you should be able to take ownership of the old folder. Once you’ve done that you should be able to browse it.
See here for instructions for XP:
And her for Vista instructions:
(On preview, I see Fear Itself posted the same link for XP)
Guys, thanks for the quick reply, that worked for me. Didn’t find the files I was hoping to see, but at least I can check off one more place not to keep looking.