Hard drive password giving me problems

[BrianS]

I have recently replaced the hard drive in my laptop and it works wonderful. I now want to use my old 2.5 inch drive as a external harddrive. Well, I bought a 2.5" external case for it. I slid the drive in it and it works perfectly except for one thing. I have always password protected my user account in windows. Now when I try to get into My Documents on the old drive just to make sure there is nothing left there before I format it, I get an error saying:

E:\Documents and Settings\Brian is not accessible.

Access is denied.

I know the password I used for it, but there has to be some other way to get past that than to actually pull the drive out of the external drive, put it back in my laptop and then remove the password and then install both drives again. Any suggestions.

Let me know what you think. Thanks.
Brian

 

[Äߧý∩†H♠H䎀]

Right click the target file and click advanced and make sure you have those files set to run as admin. Also if your running Vista make sure you have Network file sharing enabled.

 

[BrianS]

when I click on the folder (Windows XP by the way) it shows that it is a "Read-only" folder. When I click on advanced, there are 4 check boxes, non with the option to run as admin. There is "Folder is ready for archiving" "For fast searching, allow Indexing Service to index this folder" "Compress contents to save disk space" and "Encrypt contents to secure data"

Am I going into the wrong thing?

 

[Celegorm]

I know a way, but to save myself some typing, what OS are you using?

 

[BrianS]

I know a way, but to save myself some typing, what OS are you using?

XP Pro

 

[Äߧý∩†H♠H䎀]

If you want your whole documents folder to be stored on the external drive go ahead and right click on your documents folder. In the top tabs section select location. Go to move and select your external drive. That will automatically send everything to the documents folder. Make sure folder is ready for archiving is checked.

 

[BrianS]

Mattie, Im sorry if i confused you. The old drive is now in an external case. I am going to use it as an external drive for moving stuff around. The problem is before I format it, I want to look into "My Documents" on the old drive to make sure I don't have anything in there I need and might have missed.

I plan to keep the My Documents on my current internal hard drive, I just cannot access the "My Docs" from the old drive because my user account has a password on it.

 

[Celegorm]

XP Pro

Awsome. OK, boot into safe mode and log into an account with admin powers. Turn on the external drive so windows can see it. Once it has synced up, open up "My computer" and right click the external drive and click properties. You should see a "Security" tab, click that. Then you should see a button that says "advanced", Click it.

On the new window that pops up, click the "Owner" tab. You should be able to highlight a group similar to "Administrators" and click apply. You may need to hit another "Edit button" to highlight a group to take ownership with.

After you have taken ownership, you should be able to view the files anytime.

 

[BrianS]

thank you, it worked like a charm.

 

[Celegorm]

Any time.