Access Denied to old hard disk moved to newly built system

[dotoole]

My PC was on its last legs and so I rebuilt it with new motherboard, memory, processor and larger hard disk.

The old hard disk was moved alongside the new one but when I tried to access my details on the old hard disk, to move them over, I get the message "access denied". The new PC has been built with the same software setup ( XP service pack 2 build 2600 ) and the same accounts with the same passwords set up. I cannot access the hard disk even as "admin".

I would have thought that having admin rights would give me access to any hard disk physically attached to my PC. I am sure that VMS used to allow this and UNIX too. (Not that I used to do this sort of things every day with those setups).

Please help. Being the consumate IT professional I don't have a backup for the very latest data that was added. Nothing I can't live without but this is very embarrassing..

Dave

[qfisheye]

dave, I assume your hard drive shows that its there.RIGHT? If you tried to look at properties, I assume it is. I also assume the old drive is 2nd on cable and set to cable select or slave? If that is as I assume, try unplugging the new drive and set up the old one as master or(if its set as cable select) put at end of cable. Good Luck

[dotoole]

Yeah. The hard disk is intalled OK. I can navigate the folder structure but when I go to C:\documents and settings and then try to access the folder dotoole (where my favorites, desktop, mydocs etc.. are held) it says "access denied". I can access other account folders.

[dotoole]

Thought I'd post seeing as I found out the answer.

It appears that an admin does not automatically own everything. You have to take ownership of the file / folder . The article explaining this is here.

http://support.microsoft.com/default...308421&sd=tech

To do this (and I'd already looked on the security tabs of disk properties) you have to disable "simple file sharing" and how to do that is on THIS page.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/307874/

Anyway, to anyone who expended any energies on this, thanks.

Dave

[mick_bubble]

I know this thread is extremely old but I just wanted to say a huge thanks to Dave for those links! You're a champ for working out that!
I had a problem with a HD in which I was not able to access the files on 1 partition for some reason and had no idea why.
but after checking out those links, everything went back to normal again which surely is a relief as I was thinking about formatting the drive which contained data I had not backed up yet.