Please God No! Help I may have lost files.

Zascar

I reformated my pc the other day. My hard drive is partitioned into 2 - C: and - I keep all my files on and just delete the partiton on C and reinstall windows. I did this fine but for some reason, 2 of the folders on my D drive I cannot access. It just says "D:\Photos is not accessible - Access Denied"

Why would this happen and how can I fix it - as you see from above it is all my photos that seem to have disappeared. Not Happy, I have some backed up but not the new ones...

Karoma

What OS? What filesystem?
Presumably NTFS ... take ownership?

Zascar

Sorry XP Home - NTFS

Anti

Ive had this problem before, i was told to take ownership, but i always got access denied. Only thing i could do was give it to a friend who had some file recovery program..

Zascar

Sorry what do you mean by ownership?

Karoma

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/308421

Zascar

OK I tried the ownership thing it didn't work.

I was told that I should try takign the hard drive out and putting it in another pc as a 2nd hard drive, or in an external cradle.

Failing that,to try a Format MBR - Master Boot Record.
Is this dangerous?

jor el

You didn't happen to encrypt that folder by any chance did you? That's about all I can think of. If it was encrypted and you've now wiped out the old Windows (with the encryption keys) then I'm not sure if you'll be able to recover the data. There may well be tools for this though.

The MBR should have no bearing on this either. You can re-write the MBR by using a DOS boot disk and running 'fdisk /mbr'. This is only useful if your computer won't boot up though.

Zascar

No it was just a standard folder, no different to any of the others! I can't understand why 2 folders became inaccessable while all the others are fine!

nobodythere

I recommend you backup an image of the drive using norton ghost first before you go messing around with anything.

Try something simple like scandisk first maybe?

Stephen

Seriously sounds like its just an NTFS security permissions thing. This would be easier in XP Pro as it allows you to directly change permissions and take ownership etc, but with XP Home you have to reboot into safe mode to do it.

Go into safe mode, then go to properties on the folder in question. There should be a "Security" tab available. In there click advanced, and then click on the Owner tab, and then set your own user account as the owner. You should then be able to change the permissions on the folder back in the security tab. Give everyone read/write for all of your user XP home accounts to have access to the folder.

Zascar

Thank you SO MUCH guys, that worked, I wasn't doing it correctly the first time... Thank God, I was going to flip out if I lad lost my photos.

I'm off to back-up Properly! Lesson Learned!