password protected user on slave drive

[Guest]

My hard drive crashed. The restore CD did not recover it (I can't boot up on
this drive). I bought a new hard drive, installed it as Master drive, and
installed the old hard drive as a Slave drive, hoping to recover my files.
Was able to recover all files from all User Accounts except mine, the
Computer Administrator account, which I had password protected in order to
open. When I go to my (Computer Administrator) User Account in Documents and
Settings on this Slave drive via My Computer or Windows Explorer or Microsoft
Word (Open File), or other programs, I get an "Access is denied" message,
with no chance to even try to enter my old password (which, by the way, is
the same password I'm using on my new (Master) hard drive).

Since other User Account data files were OK, I remain hopeful that mine are
too, if I could just access them. Any ideas? (Hate to admit it, but I
hadn't done a comprehensive hard drive backup for six months, so I'm at least
a bit desparate.....)

Thanks in advance for any help. I'm using Windows XP Home Edition (with SP2).

 

[Matt DuBois [MSFT]]

The good news is that you're probably going to be able to get your files
back. The slightly less than good news is that the process is a little
involved on XP Home. Check out the following KB article and see if it fixes
you up. You can reply back to this message if you have more questions or
run into trouble, or even just to say that it worked for you.

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;308421

 

[Guest]

Can't believe it. Been working on this problem for about a week. Shoulda
come to you first-- only took about a half hour with your instructions and I
think I've got all my files back-- even my Microsoft Outlook email files and
address book. Thank you, thank you, thank you. You're the best, Matt
DuBois.

One followup question-- when I followed the instructions and was going to
log in as an administrator, I was surprised to see two administrator
accounts, one for me as "Owner" which I expected, and which I had password
protected, but another as just "Administrator" which was not password
protected to log on. Could this mean that someone could log on to my (and
maybe most any) computer in Safe Mode and get Administrator privileges
without a password?? And how do I protect this Safe Mode Administrator
account with a password-- I don't see it in User Accounts in the Control
Panel.

Thanks again for your help. Bye bye desparation..........

 

[Matt DuBois [MSFT]]

When you're booted into safe mode, you should be able to see the
Administrator account in the User Accounts control panel even though it
doesn't show up when you are booted normally. Is that not the case?

 

[Guest]

I have a similar problem with XP Pro. I have a second hard drive which was
partioned and was set up so only the administrator(myself) and one other
profile could access it. After I did a clean install (format c the
administrator gets an "access denied" message but it can be accessed with the
other profile. I honestly can't remember how I did this previously. I do
remember on the previous install when I would right click on the drive under
sharing and security there would be a security tab which is no longer there.
Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks,
Rick

 

[Matt DuBois [MSFT]]

There are two requirements to see the Security tab. First, the drive must
be formatted with the NTFS file system. Secondly, Simple File Sharing must
be disabled. It sounds like the drive IS NTFS, which means you just need to
disable Simple File Sharing. To do so:

Open up My Computer. Go to the Tools menu, and select Options. Click on
the View tab and look for the option "Use simple file sharing (Recommended)"
to uncheck it. It is the very last item in in the list with the English
sort order, but the position varies by language.

After doing that, you should be able to see the security tab again.

 

[Guest]

Thanks for the fast response. I just had to do a little more reading and
another post jogged my memory regarding the "simple file sharing". I turned
it off and everythings fine. That was too easy.

Another question. It seems at one time when I was poking around in the
administrative tools area I saw an option to hide drives. Is this possible?

Thanks
Rick

 

[Matt DuBois [MSFT]]

It depends a lot on what you mean by "hide". You DO have the option not
to assign drive letters to the partitions. In that case, you can't use
explorer to get to the drive, though I believe it can still be accessed
programmatically.

Instead of assigning a drive letter to a partition, you also have the option
of assigning the partition to a path on an existing drive. For example: If
you were running out of space on your C drive, you could get a new hard
drive and set it up to be accessed as c:\Documents. You really have TWO
drives, but Explorer will only show one drive and the existence of the
second one will be "hidden" so to speak.

You can access both options from the Disk Management MMC. The easiest way
to get at that is to right click on My Computer and select "Manage". Disk
Management will appear under the "Storage" section. Right click on a
partition and select "Change Drive Letter and Paths".