Can't open files/folders in USB drive

[lawpoop]

Hello all -

I bought a large external USB drive for backup on my main system. Long
story short, my main system died, and I hooked up the USB drive to
another system to get to my files. However, I can't open certain
folders on the drive, most of which are the ones I really wanted
backed up.

On the new system, I logged on as Administrator and went into the
properties of the folders, trying to change the permissions. However,
all the checkboxes are grayed out. Going into the Advanced tab has
more grayed out options and some users that are listed as question
marks with long strings as names. There weren't any permission
settings I could change; everything was grayed out.

How can I get to my data?

 

[M.I.5¾]

Hello all -

I bought a large external USB drive for backup on my main system. Long
story short, my main system died, and I hooked up the USB drive to
another system to get to my files. However, I can't open certain
folders on the drive, most of which are the ones I really wanted
backed up.

On the new system, I logged on as Administrator and went into the
properties of the folders, trying to change the permissions. However,
all the checkboxes are grayed out. Going into the Advanced tab has
more grayed out options and some users that are listed as question
marks with long strings as names. There weren't any permission
settings I could change; everything was grayed out.

How can I get to my data?

I think it's fair to say that file permissions have been set for the
original account that set the permissions on the folders. The mistake
appears to be that the permision for the administrator was not set which is
why the administrator cannot now reassign the permissions.

One thing you can try is to create an account on the new machine with
exactly the same name and password as was on the original machine, and make
it an administrator account. Now log in to the new account (in safe mode if
it is XP Home) and you should be able to access the folders and change the
permissions to include either the administator account or the administrators
group (which will allow all administartors to access it). Note that this
will totally fail to work if the folders were encrypted on the old machine
(only possible with XP Pro) - there is no way of recovery if this was the
case, except on the original machine.