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I'm Trying to Access Files on a Secondary Hard Drive w/o Admin Password as the hard drive is pulled from a laptop that crashed. When you acess the drive no files are on the desktop as we didn't log in as admin. If you take ownership of the drive the files are still not there. Is there a way around this? Both systems are running Windows Vista...

Erm, sign in as Admin?

Short of that I'd say Knoppix

Alathald wrote:Erm, sign in as Admin?

Short of that I'd say Knoppix

On a secondary drive, so how do you sign in as admin... the laptop croaked and we are trying to get his tax files off, which are in a folder on the desktop... Can't see it without the password it seems.

Oh sorry, really long day...have you tried Knoppix or some other LiveCD? Unless the drive is actually encrypted (doubtful) it should pick up on the files straight away, even without the Windows password.

yup knoppix live CD, any windows machine will pick up on the "private" setting and will look for the machine ID and user to allow access. Knoppix doesn't.

put it in another system and log in as admin?

Darkstar wrote:put it in another system and log in as admin?

How do you log in as admin on the secondary drive? We know the user/pass since it is his system, but it doesn't prompt you for that.

bubba wrote:yup knoppix live CD, any windows machine will pick up on the "private" setting and will look for the machine ID and user to allow access. Knoppix doesn't.

yeah, but how easy will it be to get a good 20GB of data off that is located all over the drive in various locations?

Apoptosis wrote:How do you log in as admin on the secondary drive? We know the user/pass since it is his system, but it doesn't prompt you for that.

I think he meant log in as admin on the Vista machine. Quick try, open Windows Explorer with administrator rights and see if you can access the folders then. If you still can't, assuming he knows the name of the folder, try typing it in directly in the address bar:
e.g. <drive_letter>:\Users\<user_name>\Desktop\<private_folder_name>

Apoptosis wrote:yeah, but how easy will it be to get a good 20GB of data off that is located all over the drive in various locations?

Since it will recognize it as an NTFS drive and just disregard the ACL, pretty easy. Probably easier than using Vista.

if you have an external USB drive or large thumb drive, just plug it in, copy and go

easy, browses just like win navigator. C of the machine your on will be HDD0, the slave your after will HDD1.

For that much data your going to want the biggest friggen USB stick you got and start transferring files. Never needed to get that much data before.

bubba wrote:For that much data your going to want the biggest friggen USB stick you got and start transferring files. Never needed to get that much data before.

For 20GB, external hard drives do exist and are likely cheaper than flash drives.

Why do I get the feeling that I'm one of the very few people who crave/need massive storage space on this board?

the fact that you probably have more storage in your sig, than I have owned in my life, should answer your question

dicecca112 wrote:the fact that you probably have more storage in your sig, than I have owned in my life, should answer your question

That reminds me, that sig is outdated.

I never really had a need to extract 20gb of data this way, couple hundred MB, do that with a USB key. Think Nate has a 32GB stick, but hell even with an 8GB it would take 3 trips between machines.

and yeah, hnzw_rui you got a fair bit of space there...

hnzw_rui wrote:

dicecca112 wrote:the fact that you probably have more storage in your sig, than I have owned in my life, should answer your question

That reminds me, that sig is outdated.

So how much storage space is currently in your house?

And what the hell do you have on it all?

Dan

i'll give that a try tomorrow... i got a 32GB USB key, so I'll just use that to get it off.

DMB2000uk wrote: So how much storage space is currently in your house?

And what the hell do you have on it all?

Dan

Already updated the sig since my last post. The Antec P182 build was my initial attempt at consolidating data scattered among my external hard drives. Unfortunately that was soon filled up with TV recordings, music (flac) and what not before I was able to move the files from my external hard drives, hence, the addition of an unRAID server. unRAID also adds a measure of protection (kinda like RAID 4 without the striping) for non-critical data which is what most of what I store is.

External Drives, 3.48TB (~85% full):
1x Maxtor One Touch 160GB
6x WD My Book 500GB Essential
1x WD My Book 320GB Pro

Antec P182, 3TB (~80% full):
3x WD Caviar SE16 750GB
1x WD Caviar GP 750GB

Antec 300/unRAID, 5.5TB (still relatively empty):
5x Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 1.5TB (1-parity, 1-hot spare, 3-storage)
1x Samsung Spinpoint F 1TB

PC1, 380GB (~95% full):
1x Samsung 80GB HD080HJ/P OS
1x Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 300GB

PC2, 320GB (~70% full):
1x WD Caviar SE 320GB

PC3, 820GB (~75% full):
1x WD Caviar SE16 640GB
1x Seagate 80GB IDE (pulled from old PC)
2x Maxtor 40GB IDE (pulled from old PC)
1x Seagate 20GB IDE (pulled from old PC)

This doesn't count storage and data on flash drives, portable USB hard drives (when I realized that flash drives just aren't big enough ) and laptops. Those also need to be offloaded to the unRAID server so I'll be getting a few more 1.5TB HDD's. A considerable amount, but that's nothing compared to what these guys have.

Ah, it's so nice to be single.

Apoptosis wrote:I'm Trying to Access Files on a Secondary Hard Drive w/o Admin Password as the hard drive is pulled from a laptop that crashed. When you acess the drive no files are on the desktop as we didn't log in as admin. If you take ownership of the drive the files are still not there. Is there a way around this? Both systems are running Windows Vista...

Easiest way I've found is to hook it to a system running XP.
That's why I'm running dual boot ... Vista is a PIA to recover files that it knows aren't yours.