Member Avatar for abccomputer

I have a Vista Laptop with a dead motherboard. I want to pull all the files off the hard drive. When I connect the hard drive to an XP computer, I cannot access all the folders in the Users Folder (which is where all the data should be).

I have changed the owership to the administator account on the XP computer and I have changed the security settings permissions to allow full control to the administrator account as well.

I now can access some, but not all of the folders. The ones that seem to be at issue are the "system" folders. Local settings, application data, etc. Of course there is valuable application specifc data in these folders that I want to get at.

How can I do this?

Laura

  • 2 Contributors
  • 1 Reply
  • 127 Views
  • 7 Hours Discussion Span
  • Latest Post Latest Post by jbennet

Dani AI

Generated

— this is a common snag when you mount a Vista NTFS volume on an older XP box. Two practical causes to consider: Vista uses compatibility junctions inside the Users tree that XP will show but intentionally block, and some data can be protected by Windows-level encryption/ownership that an arbitrary XP admin account cannot bypass.

Look past the compatibility links. The real per-user data is under Users\<username>\AppData\Roaming, AppData\Local (and sometimes AppData\LocalLow) rather than the legacy Documents and Settings\<user>\Local Settings or Application Data entries that XP often displays as inaccessible junctions. If those AppData folders are hidden, enable viewing of hidden and protected OS files in Folder Options to see them. Copy files from the actual AppData folders rather than trying to follow the compatibility junctions.

Do not grant broad permissions to Everyone on the source volume — as implied, that lowers security and can create problems later. Safer workflow: make a sector image or attach the drive with a USB/SATA adapter, mount it read-only (Linux live USB with ntfs-3g is good for this), and copy needed files to an external drive. Alternatively, attach the disk to a machine running Vista/Windows 7 and use an elevated administrator session there; those OSes understand the Vista folder layout and ACLs and make copying simpler. Always work on a copy, not the original disk, until recovery is complete.

If some files still won’t open, check for full-volume encryption (BitLocker) or per-file EFS. EFS-encrypted files require the original user’s certificate/private key; without that key the data cannot be decrypted. BitLocker volumes are unreadable without the recovery key. In short: target the real AppData folders, copy to safe media (or image first), avoid blanket ACL changes, and test on a system that understands Vista’s layout rather than forcing XP to “fix” the source disk.

Member Avatar for jbennet

You need to allow the Everyone group read permissions (big security risk)

Be a part of the DaniWeb community

We're a friendly, industry-focused community of developers, IT pros, digital marketers, and technology enthusiasts meeting, networking, learning, and sharing knowledge.