Security/Permissions Issues

So here's the issue, not long ago my friends laptop was having problems booting and with explorer.exe constatnly restarting so, i ordered a 2.5 to 3.5 in adapter and hooked it up do my desktop to remove important files then wipe it clean, here in lies the issue. I am unable to do much with the harddrive, all of the files cannot be moved, most of them are pictures and music files I NEED to save. I have Vista on my computer and the harddrive has XP, w/ sp2 on it if that makes any difference. SO my question is, how can i change permissions on ALL of the files so i can save them to my computer then wipe the old one clean? Thanks so much in advance.

 

which version of vista do you have?

Do you have access to an XP Pro machine? or vista business/ultimate?

If not, you'll need something like Knoppix live, or Digi Wiz's MiniPE (or similar).

 

On the security tab of the folder properties, under advanced, take ownership and add yourself as the auditor, giving yourself full permissions. It may take a while if there are a lot of files.

 

The Linux Live-CD is my favourite option. Knoppix is very good, but Ubuntu (http://www.ubuntu.com/) might be easier for the uninitiated (Linux isn't nearly as scary as some make it out to be). It contains drivers to mount NTFS (WinXP) drives and can read everything off them. You boot from the CD with the laptop drive connected, it should find and attach both your hard drive and the laptop drive. You should then be able to copy whatever you need from the laptop drive to your PCs drive, and voila, the files are rescued.

 

Thanks so much for all your help, i ended up using the ownership option so i could rescue all of the files and it worked out perfectly.