Recover data from previous OS

[comphollic]

how do i recover data from a previous windows xp installation. there are two windows installation in the hard drive. The first copy of windows went bad and wouldnt boot anymore, so i thought by installing a second copy in a different folder I would be able to recover the data from the previous instalation. It didnt work, I forgot I was dealing with NTFS plus the files I want to pull from were in my folder which was password protected.
I tried booting into a live linux cd (ubuntu to be exact) but the x server would not boot up, and since its has been A WHILE since I touched linux, I wouldn't be able to run it without a gui . I dont want to hassle with linux anymore unless the gui would work. The machine I'm using is a Athlon 750mhz with a very old pci 2mb video card.
I just need to pull a couple gigs, yes gigs, worth of data from the previous windows installation. Is there any way to copy those files to the current windows installation. The two windows installations are in two different folders, but the same partition. I basically want to pull this data, transfer it to my other machine my network and then reinstall the drive with a fresh copy of XP again.

ANY help I would appreciate.
thanks

 

[elkinm]

Can you see any files old files on the drive or only the fresh install.

You said your folder is password protected, is encrypted or just has an access password. You should be able to access it by taking ownership of it and/or entering the password but if it is encrypted then I am not sure. Windows is picky that way.

Did you change the documents and settings folder name. It also a system folder and needs to be backed up for a full restore.

I once recovered from a bad registry. I renamed the windows folder and the my documents folder, installed windows on the drive and set it up exactly like it was before. Copied over any old files not present in the new install of the windows and documents and settings folders and then I restored the registry hives from the good hive files I had and from system restore files and lost almost no system settings or data. That was with FAT32 though. Just not seeing all those great NTFS benefits.

Can you give more details on what happened, how your system was set up and what have you tried so far.

 

[Brazen]

yeah, boot back into your new Windows installation, take ownership of the files, then give yourself full access to them. This will work unless they are encrypted. If you don't know whether or not they are encrypted, then they are NOT encrypted.

 

[comphollic]

Well basically I was receiving a missing NTLDR once i revoved the secondary hard drive which only contained docs and files and music, nothing with windows in it. So I popped my WinXP cd and went to recover, and fixed the mbr. Still same problem. So I decided to install XP over it but in a different folder, into WINXP instead of WINDOWS. Before I had my account that was password protected and configured the settings so only I can see those files. I'm guessing thats why I can't access them in my new installation even though im signed in with the administrator account. I can see all the folders that was in my older installation, and I can access the ones that were used by the other accounts that was not password protected. I cannot access the folder that was in my account which was password protected. How do I take ownership of that folder? I know linux can read NTFS files no problem, so I hope that there is a way in windows that I can do that and just copy the files over to another folder that I can access.
Thanks

 

[bsobel]

Search here for 'take ownership'. It's quick and you'll get access to those files back.

 

[comphollic]

thank-you all!
I managed to get to my files