Solved: Copying files from our old hard drive

Hello there,
My wife's laptop died recently--there was a power supply issue, a burning smell, nothing good. The hard drive seems to be fine, though, so I bought a USB-to-IDE adaptor to copy over the files onto my desktop. The laptop had XP; desktop has Vista.

Everything worked fine, and I could access all of the files on the hard drive, except for the ones in her user folder (c:/documents and settings/purvi). When I try to open this folder, it says "You don't currently have permission to access this folder. Click Continue to access folder." I do so, and nothing seems to happen--I can hear a lot of hard drive activity in the desktop, but the folder never opens. Copying it also fails (it just sits there not copying). It did manage to copy some hidden files (ntuser.dat, the Application Data folder, etc.), but none of the stuff that on the desktop, in the My Documents folder, etc. It also claims the folder has nothing in it (even though I was able to copy some hidden files out of it).

Do you think this is a vista problem? If I tried to copy to another XP computer, might I have better luck? It's not the end of the world if we lose these files, but there are some personal things we'd like to keep.

Any idea how to see these files? Maybe there's a way to temporarily boot my desktop from the external laptop hard drive?

Any advice would be thoroughly appreciated...thank you so much!

-Bryce

 

I've run into that once... don't quite remember the sequence of commands but try the following...

First make sure you are logged in your desktop as an administrator

- Right click the (c:/documents and settings/purvi) folder and choose (properties)
- Click the (security) tab
- Click the (Advanced) Button
- You will be in the (permissions) tab. a list of users might appear, click the user you are logged in as
- Click (Edit)
- Choose the user again,
* click (add) and type (administrators) then (OK)
* or click (edit) and choose (allow) to all... Verify...

You should have full control over the folder and should be able to copy it's contents.

Hope this helps

 

It worked!!! Thank you so much! There are still a couple of subfolders I don't quite have access to yet, but I should be able to pull the same trick. It turned out administrators already had access, but I had to add myself as a user (even though I am an administrator?) before it let me see them...weird.
My sincerest thanks!

-Bryce

 

Yeah it seems kinda wierd, Not sure of the explanation but I in simple terms, I think (purvi) was an administrator on her machine and (you) are an administrator on your machine so it looks like some (administrative) conflicts so one has to take over!! I think

anyway... glad this could help. Please mark the thread as solved from the (Thread Tools) on the top right of this thread.