My video card fried, practically literally. I didn't realize that was the problem and thought the heat was coming from my power supply. I dissected it, only to discover I couldn't put it back together in a workable arrangement. Long story electrical short, I now have my good friends left-over computer, which is newer, faster, better than mine.
The problem is I have lots of valuable information on my old hard drive. When I tried to boot it on the new computer, it wouldn't boot. I moved the jumpers and set it as a slave drive, installed a clean hard drive, and it works fine.
Accept...
My data is there, but "protected". I can't get to it or edit it or copy it. I can't open it in programs that are running. Scans say its all fine--just Protected.
I am running XP, and did have my user password protected. But my new user on the new drive isn't.
Any ideas?
Posted by TomDavidson (Member # 124) on :
One easy thing to try that sometimes works (if you're on XP Pro) is to create an account on the new computer with the same username and password as the one under which the old one was protected, then log on as that user and see if you can access the drive. Try to make sure that the computer's name and workgroup are the same as the original's, too.
A more complicated thing, but one which should work provided that you did not somehow encrypt the other drive, is to log on as an administrative account and then "Take Ownership" of the slave drive and all its subdirectories and files. This article describes the process: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;308421&sd=tech
(In XP Home, it may be necessary to boot into Safe Mode before doing the above.)