How to recover data the data from a laptop HD when windows xp wont boot ?

Hi guys

I could do with some help, my fathers laptop a compac presario, would not boot up, it kept reseting, nothing seemed to work, safe mode, etc, so I thought no real problem, windows xp has gone belly up, so If I removed the hard drive and bought a 2.5" external enclosure, connected it up and my desktop running on xp could not read the contents of the hard drive, so I connected it to my laptop a fujitsu notebook s6410 on vista and here I could access the contents, but if I try open any of the documents or photos it tells me I dont have permission to view the files or documents.

I assume its related to my father having some form of password setup in windows, what can I do ? my father is very nervous about loosing his photos for the last 4 years.

Any sugestions guys ?

regards

Joe Rubido

 

Boot the working computer into safe mode. Right click the folder that you don't have permission to (Drive:\Documents and Settings\User\My Documents). Then click either permissions or security, I forget which the tab is called. Then... you know what, let me just boot into safe mode on another computer and tell you exactly what to do, but don't worry, nothing is lost.

 

Alright, click the security tab, click the advanced button.
Click the owner tab, then click your username on the good working computer (or actually, I just click "Administrators" which gives ownership to all administrators on the computer). Check the replace owner on subcontainers and objects box. Then hit okay. It will say you do now own the file, would you like to take ownership? Click yes. Then let it do it's thing. Reboot when finished in normal mode and you will be able to access the data in Windows explorer!

Enjoy!

-Hep!

 

there is also a cmd prompt code u can enter to 'take ownership' ill try and find it

 

there is software that can get files off that drive too. i use recovermyfiles and it works great. it only lost one file and it wasn't even important. (and it's probably because i didn't tell it to recover it.)