XP Pro files Take Ownership/Recovery

The Muppet

Friend of mine is in trouble with a dell pc with xp pro on it and I,m trying to help him. The hardrive is borked {5000 bad sectors on it }and I can not use the recover console to get it working . I have replaced the drive with a new one and put the damaged drive in as a slave. I can see all the folders etc on the damaged drive but I do not have permission to access them to move them up to the new drive. Is there a way of doing this?

TIA

MR DAZ

If you do search in google for "Windows Pe" cd this sort you out..

http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/

you can boot of the cd in a windows enviroment and then copy the files from the second hard disk as this should temp remove any permission prblems you are having.

Gilgamesh

the problem probably is that the old drive is formatted in NTFS.
woudl recommend a Linux based system, like Knoppix which is bootable from CD and doesn't need to be installed, this ignores the NTFS rights and you will be able to easily copy the required files over

The Muppet

Thanks Mr. Daz and Gilgamesh , I have a copy of knoppix somewhere, I,ll go searching.

Thanks again

Tom

unkel

From XP: right click on a folder on the old hard drive, properties, security, advanced, owner and take ownership

No need to do it from another OS

Blub2k4

If you use knoppix to move the stuff from the ntfs drive that is screwed to the other drive which you should format to fat32 then you can trash the rights in the move to fat32.
Be sure to unmount the ntfs drive and remount it with -w for read/write access.
Then copy the stuff over and away you go.

Capt'n Midnight

other options:
ntfsdos - you can read NTFS from Dos / win9x boot floppy

Command prompt
start - run - cmd
cacls x:\*.* /T /C /G everyone:F
xcopy x:\*.* c:\folder\*.* /s /h /r /d /y /c

course if the drive is dead then you should have it as horizontal as possible and pull the important stuff off first then the rest

EDIT - course if he used encrypted folders and doesn't have a key disk then it'll be tricky if not impossible

The Muppet

I couldn't do it with knoppix , I could see both harddisks and files but I got a write error on the new drive when I trieed to copy to it. I did a bit of goggling and I think there may be an issue with Knoppix writing to NTFS partitions as the new drive now is. I am a noob with Linus which could also be the problem. Ididn't use any switches whil copying

I think I,ll put a fat32 drive in just for the copy and hopfull get the files that way. Failing that I will try the other suggestions Thanks again for the help

Tom

Capt'n Midnight

The Muppet wrote:

I couldn't do it with knoppix , I could see both harddisks and files but I got a write error on the new drive when I trieed to copy to it. I did a bit of goggling and I think there may be an issue with Knoppix writing to NTFS partitions as the new drive now is. I am a noob with Linus which could also be the problem. Ididn't use any switches whil copying

I think I,ll put a fat32 drive in just for the copy and hopfull get the files that way. Failing that I will try the other suggestions Thanks again for the help

Tom

Yeah I'm wary of NTFS since M$ have hidden the spec and the captive drivers is a messy setup . Another option if you are feeling brave is to use ntfsresize -i /dev/hda1 (or /dev/hda2 if there is a small manufacturer partition) to shrink the NTFS partition by a couple of meg and then in windows you could setup a new FAT32 one - but if you have a FAT32 drive to hand that's probably the safest.

The Muppet

Thanks Captain Midnight . I had a fat drive handy and tried that but I still could not copy the files over. As I said earlier I,m a noob with Linux so maybe it was user error but I was getting write errors.

I did get the job done so for anyone else who finds themselve with this problem heres what i did. I followed Unkels advice and booted into the newly installed drive and took ownership from XP. I had to boot in safe mode as I could not see the security tab in normal mode. It was straigth forward from there. Here's
a step by step guide from the microsoft support.

Thanks again to all who helped .