My Documents folder security

[108]

Windows on my hard drive screwed up and rather that fixing it and maybe deleting all of my unbacked up stuff (ie porn) I bought a new 80 gig drive. I installed it and also installed my old drive to transfer all of my crap over. A lot of it was in the "My Documents" folder.

The problem is since I'm not logging in using my old hard drives Windows (the was some ntoskrnl.exe fault) I cant access the old My Documents folder. Can anyone help me?


Edit: Forgot to mention that I'm using Windows XP Professional

[MisterBishi]

Log on as an administrator, right click the folder, go to 'properties', 'permissions', 'advanced', 'owner' and change the owner to yourself or the administrators group, then give yourself Full Control perms.

[Deimos]

A similar thing happened to me when I tried to re-install XP after getting a new MB/CPU. I backed up my entire HDD onto a friend's computer then reformatted it and put it in 2 partitions (instead of the 1 that it was in before). I installed XP on to the smaller partition and had all my other stuff on the larger one but I was somehow unable to access the old My Documents folder on and I can't quite remember but I think I ended up having to reinstall it twice or something. Anyway I'm sure someone here knows how to fix it, but in the future it is best to create an ordinary folder on your HDD and use something like TweakUI or some other such program to make XP point to that folder as your My Documents folder. That way if you have to reformat or whatever you will not lose all your documents.

[MisterBishi]

The reason you are unable to access the folder is that the NTFS permissions are assigned to the account's unique Security Identifier (SID), not the username.

Creating another account with the same Username does not give it the same SID, so the account has no permissions on the resource.

[sagit]

you could also use an nt password changer or a linux-on-a-cd to read and transfer the files...

[108]

Originally posted by MisterBishi
Log on as an administrator, right click the folder, go to 'properties', 'permissions', 'advanced', 'owner' and change the owner to yourself or the administrators group, then give yourself Full Control perms.

The properties menu doesn't have a permissions option anywhere. It only has the standard "General", "Sharing", and "Customize" tabs. And there doesn't seem to be any useful options in there.

[MisterBishi]

Ok, in Explorer go to Tools, Folder Options, View and remove the tick from 'Simple File Sharing' which is right at the bottom of the list, then follow the steps above.

[108]

Woo! My porn stash is saved! My weiner thanks you MisterBishi.

[Buffalo]

Originally posted by 108
Woo! My porn stash is saved! My weiner thanks you MisterBishi.

ewwwww