Crashed hard drive...copied hard drive but can't access User area

Greetings,

I've got a hard drive with Vista that was on it's last legs. I didn't get a
chance to do a formal backup before the hard drive went bad but I was able to
copy the hard drive over to an external hard drive I have.

That's the good news. The bad news is I have no way to access the User
section with my information on it so I'm really stuck as it has all of my
personal information and such on it.

Is there any way to access this area so I can get the information on it?

 

If the drive is totaly unresponsive your only recourse is data recovery.
Your HD will be totaly diassembled and the data retrived one platter at
a time.

Thats the good news.

The bad news..

You'll pay dearly for the service. Prices range from roughly $500USD
into the thousands.

Sorry.

Good luck.

 

I read this as meaning that you were able to copy the data off the bad hard
drive onto a good hard drive. I don't know what "I have no way to access
the User section" means, though. If you are getting an "access denied"
error, then unless you actually encrypted those files all you have to do is
take ownership of them.

A. Check the permissions of the file or folder the file is saved in and take
ownership:

1. Right-click the file or folder, and then click Properties.
2. Click the Security tab.
3. Under Group or user names, click your name to see the permissions you
have.

To open a file, you need to have read permission. For more information on
permissions, see What are permissions?

http://tinyurl.com/2j9vgr

To take ownership of a folder:

1. Right-click the folder that you want to take ownership of, and then click
Properties.
2. Click the Security tab, click Advanced, and then click the Owner tab.
3. Click Edit. Administrator permission required If you are prompted for an
administrator password or confirmation, type the password or provide
confirmation.
4. Click the name of the person you want to give ownership to.
5. If you want that person to be the owner of files and subfolders in this
folder, select the Replace owner on subcontainers and objects check box.
6. Click OK

Malke