Copying off a protected NTFS HDD

[bipper]

the problem is simple, I just hope the solution is.

Being the inept windows user I am, I was wondering - I have a drive that had password protection on (NTFS), and now I must back all info off that drive. The problem comes in when I try to bring over protected folders.

The drive comes from an XP formated machine, and I would like to back it up to another XP machine. I would ideally like to be able to access the data after the copy over.

Any help would be a plus.
Thank you very much.

Bpper

[Mirage]

Do you mean it's encrypted with that file system based encryption feature in XP, or am I completely off? :p

As far as I know, if you use the file system encryption, access is only given to a certain user account. If that account is deleted, you can't get access to it again even if you make an identical user with the same password. I don't have first hand experience though, but this is what XP tells me when I turn on encryption for certain files.

[bipper]

no special encryption. Just a password when the user logs on. Just an administration password.

[o_O]

As long as it's not encrypted using EFS, you just have to back up the files.
Any folders/files that are encrypted, however, you will lose access to using this method.

If you're really concerned about the protected folders, you could always take a couple of them off and put them onto a USB flash drive and try them on a different PC. Always worked fine for me though.

Out of curiosity, are you trying to copy an installation over to different hardware? If you're copying it to another drive in the same machine, you probably want to ghost it across, but obviously that wouldn't work for a different machine.

But yeah, it's a shame you have to use Windows. :p

[bipper]

well what it is, is the HDD out of another computer that I no longer have access to. I don't think there was any encryption placed on the drive, just the protection of a windows login. I mean, I have the drive installed on another computer, but I cannot just drag the files off as it whines about permissions.

:(

[Mirage]

Oh, I think you simply need to take ownership of the files on the other hard drive.

You need to be logged in as an administrator, and have "simple file sharing" turned off (note that you can't turn this off in XP Home, should you be using that). You turn off "simple file sharing" in "folder properties".

The ownership properties should be located at "Sharing and Security" -> "Security" and then "Advanced". There should be an "Owner" tab in the new window. Once you're the owner of an object, you can change permissions of the object and make it accessable for whoever.