My Documents access from external device?

[Mike Fishcake]

Noticed a bit of a weird issue...

Occasionally we get people coming in to see us with knackered laptops, but because they need their data immediately, what we sometimes end up doing is removing their hard drive, and mounting it in a USB enclosure so that they can access their disc from another PC.

However, what I've noticed a lot of is that we can access virtually all of the folders on their hard drive except c:\documents and settings\(username)\My Documents.

Accessing their desktop or favourites folders for example is fine, just the My Documents folder.

The original Hard discs have WXP on, as do the PCs we're trying to read them from. They don't appear to be compressed or encrypted.

Does anybody have any idea what this is, or even a workaround?

[dave87]

You may find you have to take ownership of the folders using an admin account to transfer them

[Moby-Dick]

You may find you have to take ownership of the folders using an admin account to transfer them

quoted for truth

the folders will have foreign NTFs permissions on them , which you'll have to reset.

[Mike Fishcake]

Wunderbar! Many thanks for your rapid responses

Involves a bit of fiddling, but not too much.

So... pardon me if this is a stooooopid question, but if we were then to put that hard drive back in their repaired laptop, would we need to fiddle about with permissions again?

What I'm thinking is that, for the sake of ease, we just create a new folder on their hard drive and just copy all the stuff out of their my documents folder into there or something along those lines.

[Moby-Dick]

What I'm thinking is that, for the sake of ease, we just create a new folder on their hard drive and just copy all the stuff out of their my documents folder into there or something along those lines.

that works , or you can even try the migrate files and settings feature if XP is playing

[GoNz0]

http://support.microsoft.com/default...308421&sd=tech