copying protected files from a hard drive

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hypertek

Gawd
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Aug 17, 2006
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So my buddies OS took a shit and I figure I will reformat the whole thing with a fresh install of windows.

I hook up his hd to my system to back up his user /documents folder, and it wont copy all of it. When his system was running, he had the whole username and password login on it, so i think that has to be why I cant just click and drag/copy and paste this whole folder. Is there any way to get around this?

Im windows 7 btw.
 
nvm i think i figured it out, right click the folder and select "take ownership"
 
you might need to provide crendentials to gain access to the files.... i have had to do that a few times
 
There won't be a way to provide credentials since the account SID in the Access Control List of the files doesn't exist on the machine he's actually using to get at the files with. You can see that by looking at the permissions -- you'll see a bunch of numbers instead of a name because the SID doesn't resolve to an account on the system.

OP: If you have problems copying after taking ownership, just give yourself access to all the files. Ownership doesn't necessarily mean you have access to all the files, but it will allow you to give yourself access to them.
 
Demon10000 said:
There won't be a way to provide credentials since the account SID in the Access Control List of the files doesn't exist on the machine he's actually using to get at the files with. You can see that by looking at the permissions -- you'll see a bunch of numbers instead of a name because the SID doesn't resolve to an account on the system.

OP: If you have problems copying after taking ownership, just give yourself access to all the files. Ownership doesn't necessarily mean you have access to all the files, but it will allow you to give yourself access to them.
Click to expand...

I have had windows vista machines ask me for the credentials for the account to access the files when I have upgraded the hdd in the system and wanted to access the files under the account I was using. All I did was plug in the user name and password and I was granted access to the files..
 
The files don't know what your username and password are. This is something that windows manages.

When you grant rights to a file for a specific user, the user account (or the password) doesn't get stored in the file. Instead, an access control list (acl) is updated with the SID that is associated with the user account that you granted access to. It's kind of like how an IP Address maps to a friendly host name -- we see user account "JohnDoe", but the Access Control List sees S-1-5-21-891501796-420754780-2253656477-51234.

When you attempt to open a file, windows checks the access control list for the SID that your running as. Your effective permissions are then determined. It's a little more complex than that, but thats the basics of how it works.

So if you grab a hard drive from someone elses computer and pop it into yours, it's virtually impossible that for the files on the hard drive have an access control list with an entry for an account on your system. This is why you often have to take ownership of files and folders after you reformat (if you don't, you probably gave access to a well known SID (everyone, administrator, etc)).

Even if you were to create an account with the same name, the actual SID would be different. If you wanted to get access with the same account, you would have to spoof the SID.

If you were able to access the files from your computer by entering a username or password, you probably had something else going on. Maybe it was UAC prompting you for rights to the drive because it was recognized as a system drive?
 
I'll admit, i didn't read everything here, so if it's already been said I apologize. I had the same issue getting data off my Uncles HDD for him. I used XP-PE and got by the security.
 
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