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situation

• You have a hard disk that used to be in a Windows 2000 or XP machine, formatted with NTFS.
• You need to recover user data (eg. documents, email, images) from the drive.
• You have connected the drive to a Windows 2000 computer, as a slave, set the BIOS correctly, and booted as usual (eg. you have NOT booted from the drive you need to recover data from - don't try that, it will likely fail)
• You have logged in as Administrator
• You can see the drive and the file system as E:, F: or whatever on your W2K box
• BUT when you try and access the user directories (in the Documents and Settings directory) you do not have permission, and get access denied

solution 1

Take ownership of the user directories in question:

1. Right-click on c:\documents and settings\username
2. select properties
3. click the security tab
4. untick the box, [ ] Allow inheritable permissions from parent to propagate this object
5. click Advanced
6. click the Owner tab
7. click either Administrator or Administrators
8. tick the box [ ] Replace owner on subcontainers and objects
9. click OK
10. copy the files you need to copy

solution 2

Escalate your privileges to SYSTEM:

1. click Start.. Run...
2. type CMD and press Enter
3. note the current system time
4. type AT time /interactive c:\winnt\system32\cmd.exe (where time is the current time, plus 2 mins)
5. wait 2 minutes - a new command prompt window will appear
6. type Explorer and press Enter, or run your favorite file manager - the new command prompt window, and all tasks spawned by it, are running as SYSTEM
7. copy the files you need to copy

Use this method when the first method fails, which may happen on some objects, including the Recycle Bin.

notes

• 2003 & Vista drives not tested, may work the same way
• 2000 used for the recovery, XP, 2003, Vista may work as well
• recovered files were copied to a FAT32 partition on a separate drive, this may have made it easier to read the recovered files (eg. if the recovered files had been copied to an NTFS partition, they may have had their permissions copied as well, which would have frustrated the recovery. Recovery to an NTFS partition has not been tested)