Taking ownership of Vista files and folders from an XP machine

[Guest]

We have a situation where we need to recover a customers data from a Hard
Drive that has a corrupt Vista installation. Our workshop only uses XP based
machines, (we will not convert to Vista) and we can mount the Vista volume
and see files and folders, but cannot take ownership of those files and
folders in order to complete a data port. Is there any way to take ownership
of those files and folders or are we going to have to build a Vista system in
order to take ownership of that Data. We have added the option to take
ownership (as per well documented methods on the web) but as there is no
trust relationship between the Vista corrupt system, our XP machine or our
domain, we cannot take ownership of the files. Bear in mind please if the
only way is to build that additional machine, then we will likely charge that
out against the data recovery and i suspect with that additional charge the
customer will not bother to retrieve the data. Before anyone suggests it we
have tried Vista Virtual machines and that is a no go. HP as the OEM provider
of the faulty system have no answer to date. Microsoft technical help just
bounce us to HP.
-- Welcome suggestions at this point
Kapiti Tech

 

[GTS]

It's a long shot, but I would try booting UBCD4Windows (or similar tool) and
see you have any better luck from its environment. If you do PC service,
can you really avoid Vista indefinitely?

 

[Guest]

Thanks for the suggestion. The repair reinstall is where we thought we would
end up as well and it is a real possiblity depending on exactly what HP
actually send us. They have promised to ship a "recovery CD" as the standard
F11 recovery does not work.
As to the issue of avoiding Vista completely- all i can offer is our own
experience. To date we have yet to sell a Vista machine and that goes for
laptops as well, and that is what 9 months into the consumer release, so i
think we'll probably have no problem avoiding the conversion for a while yet.
We seem to sell a solid amount of XP equiped machines though, so with a bit
of luck we may avoid this particular OS completely and hope that the next
iteration is a more friendly release.