Problem accessing second hard drive

[mrza]

I have two hard drives in my PC, each has Windows XP installed. I want to access files on the second hard drive so I can transfer them to the newer installation of windows. The second drive is recognized as F and I can even open it. But when I try to access "My Documents" on the old drive it says "access denied." I can access the program folders though. Is there any way to get around this?

Any help is much appreciated.

 

[Lord Evermore]

Not exactly a hardware question. Are you logged in as an administrator? The problem is most likely that you don't have permissions to access those files, since they belong to the account you had on the old installation. You might be able to just change the permissions on the folder.

Check the OS forum. This issue comes up a lot.

 

[Dutchmaster420]

im having the same problem in vista....it wont even let me change my drive permissions

like the above posted stated youd prob get a better answer in the operating systems forum

 

[Jiggz]

Can you still boot on the old Win XP on the old hdd? If you can do the transfer from that drive to the new hdd. If not, do a repair installation just enough to access the files.

 

[mechBgon]

mrza, you need to assign Ownership of the folder to a user account on the OS you're logged on with.

On Windows XP Professional Edition, you can disable Simple File Sharing by going to Control Panel > Folder Options, clicking the View tab of the Folder Options panel, and scrolling down to the bottom and unchecking "Use Simple File Sharing."

Then you can right-click the folder you want into, choose Security from the right-click menu, and assign Ownership to your current user account, as shown in this pic :camera:. You should only need to do this once.


On Windows XP Home Edition, you cannot disable Simple File Sharing, so you can only get at the Security panels by booting up in Safe Mode and then doing what's shown above.

 

[mrza]

This worked perfectly. Thanks.