user doc permissions

[partime]

I have a slight problem, A customer brought in a compaq laptop which he had dropped and distroyed the motherboard due to inpact, He is not going to invest in a new board but he wanted his documents copied to a cd, this is ok because I can slave his hard drive to my pc and pull his docs.

problem is, OS winxp with ntfs and he had set the file permissions to private
I can not access them , I even tried setting a his user account and password he used on his drive.. anyone know how to reset this folders attributes?

[DonJ]

I found this on another forum:
Accessing Folder in Winxp without permissions

Boot the computer into safe mode hit F8 before it loads windows. Log in as administrator. Oper windows explorer right click on the drive you cant access.Go to security tab then advanced then owner click on your user name or the admin group of your computer and then replace owner on subcontainers and objects then hit ok. this should replace the owner of all the files and subfolders on the drive with your username you should then have full access.

This solved their problem. It just might help you too.

Good Luck!

[InTheWayBoy]

That's what I would suggest...either that or as an extreme you could try converting the drive to FAT32, but that might not be so smart.

[partime]

Boot the computer into safe mode hit F8 before it loads windows. Log in as administrator. Oper windows explorer right click on the drive you cant access.Go to security tab then advanced then owner click on your user name or the admin group of your computer and then replace owner on subcontainers and objects then hit ok. this should replace the owner of all the files and subfolders on the drive with your username you should then have full access.

this is the right idea but I had to reset user for everybody with full access /inherited


thanks for the guidance