franken-puter... can't get to my extra hard drive

[fuel tanker man]

I had a major virus issue with my emachine and it's in the hospital as we speak...

I now have a donated Compaq Presario of about 3 years old, and was not happy with the hard drive and RAM, so I took apart my crashed HP which served me faithfully for 8 years until the fan clogged with dust and presumably cat hair and stopped running and of course the processor fried.

I took the hard drive out of the HP because it had some stuff on it I wanted, and installed it into the Compaq as a slave drive (the Compaq's main hard drive is left in place). I also cannibalized the 256 ram card, and while I was at it put the CD/RW in as well, so now I've got two of those...

All works fine, the machine recognizes all of its new parts--but when I try to open up the document folder on my old hard drive called "owner" it blocks me. I am assuming it doesn't think I have permission?

Anyway... I was wondering if any of you guys have any suggestions as to how I can get into this document folder (my pictures are there too).

The old hard drive (it's drive F in the new system) has Windows XP on it, so I guess I could maybe boot up from that drive... but I'm not sure how to do that exactly (without changing the BIOS settings which I'd rather not do unless absolutely necessary).

Any help appreciated.

Dan

 

[TrentMiller]

For xp, from Ms,

To take ownership of a file or a folder
How to take ownership of a file
You must have ownership of a protected file in order to access it. If another user has restricted access and you are the computer administrator, you can access the file by taking ownership.

To take ownership of a file, follow these steps:

1. Right-click the file that you want to take ownership of, and then click Properties.
2. Click the Security tab, and then click OK on the Security message (if one appears).
3. Click Advanced, and then click the Owner tab.
4. In the Name list, click Administrator, or click the Administrators group, and then click OK.

The administrator or the administrators group now owns the file.

To change the permissions on the file that you now own, follow these steps:

1. Click Add.
2. In the Enter the object names to select (examples) list, type the user or group account that you want to have access to the file. For example, type Administrator.
3. Click OK.
4. In the Group or user names list, click the account that you want, and then select the check boxes of the permissions that you want to assign that user.
5. When you are finished assigning permissions, click OK.
6. You can now access the file.

How to take ownership of a folder
You must have ownership of a protected folder in order to access it. If another user has restricted access and you are the computer administrator, you can access the folder by taking ownership.

To take ownership of a folder, follow these steps:

1. Right-click the folder that you want to take ownership of, and then click Properties.
2. Click the Security tab, and then click OK on the Security message (if one appears).
3. Click Advanced, and then click the Owner tab.
4. In the Name list, click your user name, or click Administrator if you are logged in as Administrator, or click the Administrators group. If you want to take ownership of the contents of the folder, select the Replace owner on subcontainers and objects check box.
5. Click OK, and then click Yes when you receive the following message:
You do not have permission to read the contents of directory folder name. Do you want to replace the directory permissions with permissions granting you Full Control?
All permissions will be replaced if you click Yes.

Note folder name is the name of the folder that you want to take ownership of.
6. Click OK, and then reapply the permissions and security settings that you want for the folder and its contents.

 

[fuel tanker man]

Trent, thanks for the help. I think I'm getting things working now...

Dan