How to access another machine's NTFS drive as an external USB drive

[Philip Herlihy]

I've been trying to fix a Win2K machine with disk errors. I thought I
should be able to hook up the drive via an external USB adapter or
enclosure, but I can't get a "handle" on it. I can see the disk in Disk
Management, and it's whirring away. I can even get Ghost to start cloning
it, although it gave up the Ghost (ouch) when it found 64 bad sectors (is
that a lot?).

I'd been told that all I needed to do was take ownership of the drive from
my XP admin account and then set suitable permissions, but the disk hasn't
been allocated a drive letter and I can't find any options other than
removing the partition. Any ideas gratefully received.

 

[Test User]

I've been trying to fix a Win2K machine with disk errors. I thought I
should be able to hook up the drive via an external USB adapter or
enclosure, but I can't get a "handle" on it. I can see the disk in Disk
Management, and it's whirring away. I can even get Ghost to start cloning
it, although it gave up the Ghost (ouch) when it found 64 bad sectors (is
that a lot?).

I'd been told that all I needed to do was take ownership of the drive from
my XP admin account and then set suitable permissions, but the disk hasn't
been allocated a drive letter and I can't find any options other than
removing the partition. Any ideas gratefully received.

Try using diskpart and the list, select and assign commands. You'll need to
identify the physical disk with 'list', 'select' it and whatever volume are
appropriate, then 'assign' to give it a drive letter.

You may ultimately need to physically add the drive to the IDE chain in your
system... I regularly do this and it works very well. I disconnect the 2nd
CD drive on the 2nd channel and attach the drive there.

HTH
-pk

 

[Pavel A.]

If your disk has physical bad blocks, better connect it to IDE
in order to have maximum control while rescuing the data.
--PA

 

[Philip Herlihy]

Try using diskpart and the list, select and assign commands. You'll need
to
identify the physical disk with 'list', 'select' it and whatever volume
are
appropriate, then 'assign' to give it a drive letter.

You may ultimately need to physically add the drive to the IDE chain in
your
system... I regularly do this and it works very well. I disconnect the 2nd
CD drive on the 2nd channel and attach the drive there.

HTH
-pk

Thanks, I'll give that a go. I'd hoped to use a USB adapter on my laptop,
but if I can't figure a way to get that working I'll use a desktop instead.
Appreciated.

 

[Philip Herlihy]

Thanks - I'll try that.

 

[Richard Lewis Haggard]

I had a bad experience with 'taking ownership'. I had a system boot drive
that was of debatable quality and decided to make a copy of it in
preparation for replacing it. I took it out of the problem machine and put
it into a USB enclosure (had to set some jumpers so that it would be
recognized by the enclosure) and attached it to my w2k3 server. The server
wouldn't do anything with it until I allowed it to take ownership. I made a
copy of the world and put it back into the problem machine. At that point,
the problem machine wouldn't boot because, I guess, it no longer owned its
own disk. I ended up rebuilding the problem machine from scratch.

Next time I'll try doing the copy directly from the problem machine. If that
fails, I'll avoid changing the security and ownership values at all costs.
===
Richard Lewis Haggard

 

[Philip Herlihy]

Presumably you tried to take ownership back again? I found I couldn't take
ownership of the disk because I couldn't see the root folder - Disk
Management was giving me no options. What a black art this is!