Denied access to salvage my documents

S

Stuh505

Limp Gawd
Joined
Feb 15, 2004
Messages
488
I have a hard drive with XP home on it that has 80GB of important information stored in the My Documents folder of a specific profile. The operating system is so seriously infected with malware that it is not possible to use the computer even in safe mode. The entire device manager seems to be gone from windows and even simple devices such as mice and USB drives do not work. All profiles and any new profiles I create are corrupt, infected with processes that run at 100% CPU even in safe mode. I assume that there are probably some rootkits at play here.

What I would like to do is copy the data from the my documents folder of a specific profile onto a different hard drive, reformat the original drive, and put the data back. I have attached this hard drive as a slave to my personal PC and can access all the files on the hard drive except for anything within the specific my documents profile that I need. I get an error message saying access is denied when I try to read from that folder. I am not sure why this is happening because I have no trouble accessing the my documents folders of any of the other profiles on the computer (which are also password protected, and I dont even need to enter the passwords). I tried changing the sharing options of this folder but it doesn't work.
 
Go under the properties of the folder and under security take ownership of the folder. Once you do that you can give your user account on that machine full access to it and get your data.
 
This solved the problem, although for the record I had to boot into safe mode to see the security tab on XP home.
 
Stuh505 said:
This solved the problem, although for the record I had to boot into safe mode to see the security tab on XP home.
Click to expand...

Forgot to say you may need to go into safe mode. O well at least you got it.
 
swatbat said:
Go under the properties of the folder and under security take ownership of the folder. Once you do that you can give your user account on that machine full access to it and get your data.
Click to expand...


what if this does not work?
 
Also PLEASE scan the folders BEFORE moving them over. Otherwise you will simply propagate your problem.
 
Martyr said:
what if this does not work?
Click to expand...

In a home environment, it never should even be an issue, if you use the same username and password on your new build. I haven't been able to recreate this problem, unless I change my account info.

Also, it's another good reason why, on a home computer, not to use the My Folders crap, and store your files on a data drive. You wouldn't have any of these issues, when moving your documents to a new computer or build.
 
djnes said:
Also, it's another good reason why, on a home computer, not to use the My Folders crap, and store your files on a data drive. You wouldn't have any of these issues, when moving your documents to a new computer or build.
Click to expand...

I still had the same problem when all my backup data was on a completely different hard drive. Everything worked fine when I had that hard drive installed to get the data but when I moved all of it to this hard drive I didn't have permission to access the files.
 
djnes said:
In a home environment, it never should even be an issue, if you use the same username and password on your new build. I haven't been able to recreate this problem, unless I change my account info.

Also, it's another good reason why, on a home computer, not to use the My Folders crap, and store your files on a data drive. You wouldn't have any of these issues, when moving your documents to a new computer or build.
Click to expand...

i have 6 old system restore folders on a drive, and i cannot delete them no matter what i do. i have taken ownership of them, given myself, complete control, ect ect. even tried in osx, still wont.
 
I use the same username an password on each of my builds at home, so maybe this is why. As I mentioned above, the only way I could ever recreate this problem is if I changed my username or the password on the account.
 
i have the same name/pw as well. but should that even matter? i mean, i took ownership of the folder, it shouldnt matter at all what the name/pw were before, i should have full access now.
 
In a perfect world, you'd have access to the local files because you probably have admin rights to the box. On a separate data drive, this "take ownership" access denied problem shouldn't ever arise. I really don't know why this is such a common problem, but it is. I keep all of my personal files on my D drive, and I've never had a problem with other computers, gaining access to those files for them. There must be something wonky going on that's making things different for different people. I've only ever been able to get that message when trying to access those files on C or in the My Folders from another account with differeing usernames or passwords. Never have I gotten the message on data drives.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top