Volume Recovery

[richardalan3]

My Brother's Dell Dimension 5150 has crashed with 90GB of personal
information on it. Not sure why, maybe caused by recent power cuts. Boot
sequence starts but then blue screens.
I have installed XP Home on an unused second partition which started off as
F drive. This drive gave me access to the original C drive that would not
boot. At this point I expected being able to simply recover the lost data by
copying it from the C drive to the new operating drive. I have done this
before with great success.
However, this time I was unable to copy and paste my Brother Steve's folders
to the new drive. Access to the "Steve" folder was denied. I believe this has
happened because Steve has password protected his own folders.

Does anyone know of a workaround to this problem?

Note: During the course of my various attempts at recovery the drive letters
have changed. My recovery XP OS has changed drive letter from F to C drive
and my lost Volume is currently without a drive letter.

 

[Sampathn]

Did you try with recovery console?

Go to recovery console, select your previous installation and try to use
these tools,

Fixmbr :- will write HDD MBR
Fixboot :- will write net partition table
Chkdsk/r :- will check HDD for errors and repairs

You can get more help with "/?" on recovery console. This might repair your
HDD partition.

Reg,
Sampathn.

 

[richardalan3]

When I tried using the the recovery CD and chose R to repair I got a blue
screen.
See my note as well - Drive letters have now changed.

 

[Sampathn]

When you are in your new installation, did try to change permissions on your
brothers folder?
And also U can try to repair your old partition from there, using Check Disk
utility.

Reg,
Sampathn.

 

[John John]

DON'T chkdsk the volume if you want to save files on it!

Recover the files from the working Windows installation or mount the
disk in another computer. To access the files and folders take
ownership of them, look in the help files for "ownership".

John

 

[richardalan3]

John,

Thanks for your guidance - it is moving me in the right direction. I did the
right click on Steve's folder and enabled sharing which gave access to his
folders. However each individual folder is now denying access and the right
click go to properties etc. does not work on these. Any more thought?

Richard

 

[John John]

Are you sharing/accessing the files over a network? Check the
permissions on the share, disable simple file sharing to see the
permissions. http://support.microsoft.com/kb/304040

If you are trying to access the files from a second parallel
installation on the same computer or if you have mounted the disk in
another computer you don't need to share the folders, just take
ownership of the files and folders and grant yourself necessary
permissions and you will be able to access the files.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/308421/en-us

Using the CACLS command at a command prompt you can also grant yourself
full control on the files:

cacls c:\ /t /e /g YourUserName:f

will grant full control to all the files and folders on C: to
YourUserName. If there are spaces in your username your have to
surround the name with quotation marks:

cacls c:\ /t /e /g "Your User Name":f

John