I had an old computer's mobo die on me so I moved the harddrive into my new computer to retrive some files off it. My old computer was running Win2000 Pro and my new computer is running WinXP. I've gotten most everything copied over except some files I had in a hidden, password protected folder. I can't access the folder and it tells me that access is denied. It would save me much time, especially on my taxes if I could get to these files but I don't know how. Can anyone help me?

Thank you,
Jon

Come on no one has any solution to this. Is it just impossible? I don't believe in things being impossible.

If you really need to get at the data try putting the old hdd as the boot disk in the new computer and booting up. log on with your old acount and password (you will probably get lots of errors but just ignor them), and transfer you data to the new drive.

EFS (the encription on W2K and XP) is a real nightmare to crack and would probably need a brute froce attace whice would take a lot longer than swapping the disks.

I put the drive in as the master drive and set it to to be the boot disk. I got to the black screen that says windows is starting, and then it goes to a nice blue screen of death that bas a nice long error message ending in Inaccessible_Boot_Device. I can't get any further than that.

Have you tried F8 on boot and use safe mode?

You may be able to get in that way.

Also if it's a IDE hard drive then make sure it's not on a raid IDE channel (e.g. the cd rom conector) and try booting from that.

You need to take ownership of the files to pull them off.

So, with file sharing enabled, you'll want to right click on the folder you want, go to security, scroll down to the Ownership or find the Ownership tab, make yourself the owner, and then it's all yours.

You can also search Microsoft on how to take ownership of files..

Did you slave the old drive? If so,, you should be able to copy all of the folders over to your MASTER drive. When you slave a drive, any and all security features are no longer secured. It seems like maybe those files may be corrupt????

If all else fails, Try using a LIVE version of linux on order to copy those files..

But I cannot see why you would not be able to copy files from the old drive to the new one.