Accessing passworded accounts on damaged hard drive?

wer* · 14-03-2007 1:50pm #1

The hard drive on my PC recently went faulty - damaged sectors causing Windows to crash/fail to boot. Apart from the faulty sectors, the integrity of the rest of the data seems ok.

I bought another internal drive, installed XP and then connected my old drive as another internal drive with a view to copying the data from the old drive to the new drive. Unfortunately, I had a password on my old XP account and I am not allowed access files in my account (e.g. account folder in Documents and Settings).

Can anyone suggest a fix/workaround to get access to these files? Thanks

degsie · 14-03-2007 1:59pm

Have you tried creating an account with the same password?

wer* · 14-03-2007 2:09pm

No, that is something I could try.

Ideally,I would just like to be able to open the old C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\ folder on the damaged drive but will try creating an account with the same username and password

fguinan · 14-03-2007 2:42pm

You can download a live Linux distro like knoppix. You can then easilt boot from the live CD and easily copy the files to a FAT partition or onto a writable CD or DVD.

bushy... · 14-03-2007 2:47pm

If the drive is failing , maybe you'd be better off copying it to another drive in case it dies completly in the middle of the recovery

SickBoy · 14-03-2007 4:02pm

You need to take ownership of the files/folders in question.
Follow the instructions on this page http://support.microsoft.com/kb/308421
Hope this helps.

irlrobins · 14-03-2007 5:30pm

If you had looked in the FAQ you would have found the answer without having to post.... :cool:

Accessing passworded accounts on damaged hard drive?

Comments