Installed Vista; how do I move the files?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Rod
  • Start date Start date
R

Rod

I have a machine which I've made from parts of an older PC. Everything in
it was new, except for the IDE hard drive, which is both small and old. So,
I went out and purchased a new SATA HD. I decided to install Vista onto the
new HD, but leave and old IDE HD in place, so that I could copy files out of
people's My Documents folders into their new locations under Vista.

Well, I had forgotten about the security put upon everyone's My Documents
folder under Documents and Settings, under Windows XP. Getting to all of
those files is a real pain. I can go in and take ownership of each file,
but that looks to me as though I have to respond to a dialog box, one file
at a time, and that is not a reasonable option. How can I get those files
out of those older My Documents folders? Do I remove the security that is
in place for each one, or what do I do?

Rod
 
Hi Rod,

Right click the Documents and Settings folder, select properties. Go to the
security tab and click advanced. Go to the Ownership tab, click edit. Change
to your account AND enable the box to propagate to all subfolders and
containers. Apply/ok your way out, it may take some time to run through but
should change permissions for access on all the user account folders.

Just as an added note, if you encrypted any of the user files, you would
need the original encryption certificate in addition to the above steps.

--
Best of Luck,

Rick Rogers, aka "Nutcase" - Microsoft MVP

Windows help - www.rickrogers.org
My thoughts http://rick-mvp.blogspot.com
 
Rick,

I am afraid that it did not work.

Rod

Rick Rogers said:
Hi Rod,

Right click the Documents and Settings folder, select properties. Go to
the security tab and click advanced. Go to the Ownership tab, click edit.
Change to your account AND enable the box to propagate to all subfolders
and containers. Apply/ok your way out, it may take some time to run
through but should change permissions for access on all the user account
folders.

Just as an added note, if you encrypted any of the user files, you would
need the original encryption certificate in addition to the above steps.

--
Best of Luck,

Rick Rogers, aka "Nutcase" - Microsoft MVP

Windows help - www.rickrogers.org
My thoughts http://rick-mvp.blogspot.com
Click to expand...
 
The permissions/ownership action fails on several files, but it seems to
complain about some very long GUID like string, that is associated with
several different files. I have to constantly press the return key in order
to respond to numerous dialog boxes all saying the same thing that file
such-and-such won't be modified because of <very long number here, which
looks like some GUID or perhaps a SID>. Then when I try to copy the file
from its old location under the "D:\Documents and Settings\..." are to
C:/users/<my account>/Documents it won't copy it, saying that I don't have
any permissions to do so, even though I run as Administrator.

Do you know of a command line equivalent that I might be able to run against
the old location, to try and fix this, please?

Rod
 
Rod said:
Do you know of a command line equivalent that I might be able to run
against the old location, to try and fix this, please?
Click to expand...

Have you tried copying via command line (as opposed to trying to remove the
permissions problem via command line, which is what I think you're asking)?
Maybe xcopy would do the trick. I'm afraid my DOS and DOS-equivalent days
are long gone, so I'm not sure if that's what you need.
But if you go into a command prompt and type "xcopy/?" (without the quotes,
of course) it will give you a long list of switches. It could be you don't
need any switch and that xcopy by itself will do the trick.
 
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