A friend of mine asked me to help fix her "bogged down" computer. She needs a processor she says. After waiting like 15 minutes for it to boot, I check the system and here is a snapshot of it Someone put WIN XP on that thing!!! To make a long story short, the machine doesn't work well so I pulled the hard drive and put it in my external device to save what I could while I build an inexpensive new one. The hard drive works fine but I cant access half the files from it because when you turn on a computer they had password to log on and all those files are locked from my external enclosure. I have the password, but it don't ask for it when you just browse for folders in explorer, just access denied. I've built a few machines and saved a few dead ones but never ran into this. Any ideas?
do you have a spare hd to hook up to her machine with her hd in place? the purpose is to copy the info of her hd onto your hd. whoever put xp on that machine is an idiot.
Outside of the fact that it was running in an antique machine, maybe that dead/dying hard drive was the reason it was running slow. There are some programs that may be able to recover the files, but they aren't free.
http://www.majorgeeks.com/download.php?id=38&sort=0 http://www.ontrack.com/freesoftware/ http://www.z-a-recovery.com/download.htm http://www.snapfiles.com/Freeware/system/fwdatarecovery.html http://www.pcworld.com/downloads/collection/collid,1295-order,1-c,downloads/files.html http://www.easeus.com/ http://www.ntfs.com/products.htm http://www.pcinspector.de/download.asp?language=1#file_recovery http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec
Thank you all for your replies and suggestions, but as usual DDP came closest to understanding the problem. The hard drive itself runs fine when it is attached as an external. I dont believe data recovery tools would help unless they also open locked files on a running machine.The problem is that files are locked due to XP login admin account. Its used to being the main (C drive on its board and is just an extra disc on mine. I quickly attempted to throw it back into its old box like you said DDP, but the mobo power cables are different for this old board and maybe I didnt put it back together right. I will try again after looking to see if there are manuals for 10 year old IBM Aptivas!!! Again, thanks.
all hd power connectors are mostly the standard 5.25" version with a few that use the 3.5" floppy connector.
I finally had a few extra hours to sit down a look at everything and figured things out. I missed a small 3 pin power cord to the ancient motherboard hidden under the IDE cables. I didnt know the old machines had an extra power input let alone one that looks like todays fan power. I was able to get the old machine to live again. I removed passwords and since I have short patience, put the HD back in an external enclosure and hooked it up to wifes laptop while I watch TV!!! All is well again. Thanks all for throwing ideas at me till It was narrowed down enough blame the operator as usual.
