bad os install

[rasczak]

hi guys,

here's what happened,

father decided needed new installation of win xp home. he used the recovery tool and did the non destructive restore.

problem now is he cannot get past the windows black screen, it's stuck on please wait.

i pulled the drive, and plugged it into to my own machine, ran a virus scan and adware/spyware. boy did he have a buttload of crap. after properly chastising him for looking at too much porn, he aggreed to wipe the drive clean and start fresh.

Problem: my sister have files on the drive that we need to save. her account is password protected, so everytime i tried to access her user profile, i get access is denied. i have tried cut the file out and pasting to another directory, no use. She is not available (out of town and she does not respond to my phone calls) to give me her password so i can create her user name and password on my own machine to see if i can access her stuff. I've also tried changing the permissions on her folder to add myself as a admin but windows explorer promptly goes kaput.

So now I've booted into a live install of ubuntu but I forgot how to create a directory in order to mount the drive.

help?

any and all advice will be appreciated.

joe

 

[Brazen]

sounds like the files are encrypted. I hope your stalkee backed up her encryption key. Creative story, by the way.

 

[rasczak]

haha, actually it's all true 8). but they aren't encrypted. the files are from her user account which is password protected.

 

[nweaver]

take ownership of the files first.

 

[Cynicist]

Open up a terminal in Ubuntu and type


sudo mkdir /mnt/windows
sudo mount -t /dev/hda1 /mnt/windows


then of course


cd /home/username/Desktop
mkdir backup
cp * /mnt/windows/herdirectory /home/username/Desktop/backup


or use cp -R if there are directories within that directory.

Type cp --help into the terminal for more information

 

[n0cmonkey]

If explorer is crashing (and not just SLOWING down drastically making it practically unusable while it redoes permissions on a lot of files) you probably have an issue or two of your own to worry about.

 

[rasczak]

Originally posted by: nweaver
take ownership of the files first.

worked like a charm nweaver, thanks a million man!


joe