Hi all,

I have an interesting problem I hope someone can help me with. I had a hard drive that had Win XP Home on it decide to not boot up & figured it was just dead, so I bought another hard drive. Installed Win XP Home on that one & just for giggles hooked up the other hard drive to see if I could save any data from it. I was surprised to find I could see my husband's info on his side, but on my side (which was also the computer admin) I couldn't see any of my data. Whenever I would click on my folder it would give me an access denied message. Also I looked at the Windows folder & realized that whatever it was that hosed the hard drive, took out better than half of the folders out of the Windows folders so it was no wonder the thing wouldn't boot up. Anyway, my problem is, I can't get to my data because I either made it private or I didn't set it up for sharing (can't remember honestly which of these I may have done) and I can't get into the hard drive by booting it up because Windows is hosed on that drive.

Any suggestions on how I can get my data off the old drive?

~kira

Firstly I am going to guess that the data you are trying to retrieve was in the Documents and Settings folder. This is where My Documents resides for each user. As a small aside I always advise people not to use My Documents given it is a system folder and can become corrupted when the system does. (My wife lost many of our son's baby pictures this way, I had the back ups though.)

You are going to need to take ownership of the folder and files you do not currently have access to. Given you are running XP Home you will be required to boot into safe mode accomplish the task. The step by step direction are here from Microsoft's support site.

Another option would be to use a Linux live CD like Knoppix that supports NTFS volumes. Though I do not know off hand if the security from the file system is retained when so doing.

Hope this helps and let us know if we can help further.

Na, cross-os reading generally ignores everything, including writing. Rescue disks get round this.

I'am not familiar with windows xp home edtion.
But it seems that you have used the make folder private feature of windows xp home.
As it will assign only the user who is owner of a folder so that no another users could
access the folder.

You can access again by logged in with administator.
And then right-click the folder that you need to access.
Choose property --> Click security tab --> Choose advanced button
Select Owner tab.

Select the user you want to gain access to the folder.
Remember click the Replace owner on subcontainer and objects.