Help Recovering Data

[Friar]

Hi guys, I wonder if someone could give me any advice on the folowing problem;

I have been asked by a friend to try and recover data from a replaced hard drive.

The drive was replaced before I got to see it because it was un accessable.

Appently it became unaccessable after a windows update which was not installed, the machine was just switched off. The next time they switched the pc on it would not boot up.

The machine was given to another party who has replaced the hard drive.

I now have the drive. Using a USB 2.0 to IDE and SATA cable I have been able to acces the drive from my machine.

Initially I was not able to read any information on the drive. I just received an error message (which I can now not remember what it said doh!)

After doing some reasearch on the net I performed a "chkdsk /r"

During the chkdsk there were numerous messages. Some related to orphaned files others related to indexs being re-calculated.

I now have access to all the folders except the "My documents". When I try it says Access Denined".

I have tried various security / permission settings but to no avail.

I have tried taking it back to the original machine and using the cables plugged into that machine but got the same issue.

The new hard drive does not have the same user names. The third party just generated a generic username.

IS there anything else I could try?

Cheers

Friar

[B16Enk]

You need to take ownership of the my documents folder:

Right click > Properties > security > click 'Advanced' > click 'Owner Tab' > in 'Change owner to:' field click your user name click the 'Replace owner on subcontainers and objects' box then click apply.

This should then replace the security on the folder and sub folders

[gec]

Try this:

right mouse button on the folder -> sharing and security. click security tad, click Advanced, Owner tab. In the Change owner to area pick your username, tick the Replace owner on subcontainers and objects. OK, OK.

off course all that is possible only if u have administrative rights on your computer.

gec

[gec]

lol B16Enk types faster than i am

[Friar]

Excellent, thanks guys.

The only thing i had to do to enable this was to turn off "simple file sharing" to get the security options for her pc.

I love you guys.........

[Friar]

also,

bit of a long shot but any idea of what may have caused the drive to screw up like that?

could it have been the update patially installed, although I was told that when shutting down the machine they were given the option to install and shut down or just shutdown, they just shutdown.

[B16Enk]

Depends how they shutdown, my guess is they said to update and changed their minds and power cycled the system, this would have left some files deleted pending replacement and screwed up the MFT = no boot.

Was it PC World that put the new drive in for them?

If you could boot off the old drive, I would check the event log (type eventvwr in the start box) and look under system tab for any disk errors/warnings.

[Friar]

dont know if it was pc world.

i think its job done, i can get the data now, they have a new hard drive. so they have learned a lesson that they should have asked me first!

thanks for all you help as allways