Can't take ownership of a users folder

Ryck

Limp Gawd
Joined
Mar 7, 2003
Messages
345
I have recently pulled a friends hard drive from his system. He says the system is dead. He wants to get his documents from his folder, and any music as well. I pulled the drive and slaved it to my system where I have an admin account. It won't let me take ownership. Is there anything I am missing. I tried to change owners, as well as grant myself permission.

Is there something I am missing.
 
What's the error message it gives you? You could try using icacls.exe command line tool.
 
I'd run a full chkdsk on the drive to make sure there's no issues with data corruption.
 
What OS are you using, and what OS is on your friend's drive? You could try to locate an old version of ERD Commander (like version 5) and boot from that and see if it will let you in.
 
I'd run a full chkdsk on the drive to make sure there's no issues with data corruption.

I don't think I would run a chkdsk before attempting to get access to the data outside of Windows. I've seen entire drives truncated by chkdsk.
 
Sometimes the permissions are smashed beyond belief.

Open permissions and security.

Step 1 Assign the Owner as "everyone"
Step 2 Assign "everyone" full control under permissions
Step 3 Assign "everyone" full read/write access

Restart the machine

Copy all important files to another directory.


Delete original data.

Run Checkdisk on the old drive.
 
I've had luck before using Ubuntu or Knoppix's built in file navigator to pull data I couldn't gain ownership on Windows of.

Also keep in mind, if his user files were encrypted you won't be able to get them no matter what. Wouldn't Windows XP do that if you told it you didn't want anyone else to be able to see your Documents and Settings folder when setting up users?
 
It didn't encrypt if you said you didn't want others to see your stuff - just applied permissions so that you or a system admin could get to your stuff

To enable the delayed recycle bin....sorry... Encrypted File System you have make a few positive actions to turn it on
 
It was weird, I actually was able to get ownership of the drive by using the takeown command. Strange that I couldn't get ownership through Windows 7. His OS was Vista. Then the drive died, though I was able to get the data he wanted off of it before it's death.
 
Sometimes the permissions are smashed beyond belief.

Open permissions and security.

Step 1 Assign the Owner as "everyone"
Step 2 Assign "everyone" full control under permissions
Step 3 Assign "everyone" full read/write access

Restart the machine

Copy all important files to another directory.


Delete original data.

Run Checkdisk on the old drive.

This. Glad you were able to get the data before it died. I deal with that shit constantly at work. We use FDE which has a habit of killing weak drives.
 
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Full Disk Encryption - Instead of encrypting just a single file or folder, you encrypt the entire drive. You then have to authenticate via passphrase or token of some kind at boot time to unlock the drive.
 
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