Access is denied to files and folders on old HDD

[Guest]

Hello.

My old HDD was dying and has a S.M.A.R.T. error (although it will still boot
and run it is getting slow).

So I bought a new drive, slammed it in the case and decided to do a nice
clean reinstall (XP Home with all the SP2 and updates available).

I left the old drive in the bay and was hoping to copy across any odd file
I'd forgotten to backup later. I can still change my BIOS to boot to the old
drive so I know it hasn't totally died yet.

However I get a lot of "Access is Denied" messages when trying to
view/read/change attributes on files/folders especially in Documents and
Settings.

Any ideas please on how I can make all these files available when I'm booted
into the new HDD as I can see them but not touch!

Most of the KB articles apply to XP Pro (simplified file sharing) which are
no use to me.

Thanks for any ideas.
Carole

PS. My last resort is to backup the whole old HDD to an external device and
then try to access that...

 

[Will Denny]

Hi

Depends on what the problem is with the old HD, but please see if the
following article helps:

"How to take ownership of a file or folder in Windows XP"
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;308421

 

[Michael Cecil]

Hello.

My old HDD was dying and has a S.M.A.R.T. error (although it will still boot
and run it is getting slow).

So I bought a new drive, slammed it in the case and decided to do a nice
clean reinstall (XP Home with all the SP2 and updates available).

I left the old drive in the bay and was hoping to copy across any odd file
I'd forgotten to backup later. I can still change my BIOS to boot to the old
drive so I know it hasn't totally died yet.

However I get a lot of "Access is Denied" messages when trying to
view/read/change attributes on files/folders especially in Documents and
Settings.

Any ideas please on how I can make all these files available when I'm booted
into the new HDD as I can see them but not touch!

Most of the KB articles apply to XP Pro (simplified file sharing) which are
no use to me.

Thanks for any ideas.
Carole

PS. My last resort is to backup the whole old HDD to an external device and
then try to access that...

What I would do is to make a FAT32 drive in a partition at the end of the
new drive that is big enough to hold all the data you want to transfer.
Then I would boot into your new XP Home install in safe mode as the
administrator (who should have the ability to copy all those "access
denied" files and folders. Copy them to the FAT32 drive. That will strip
all the permissions and rights and any alternated data streams from those
files. Then you can boot back into your new XP Home install and do what
you will with those files. Finally, once it's empty you can delete the
unneeded FAT32 partition and expand the drive's main partition (if that's
what you want) to use the full space available. (You'd need a third party
partitioning tool for that of course.)