Help...? Administrator folders are locked on secondary HDD

[BroncoBuff]

Hard drive died recently (bluescreen flash at boot, system restart over and over). Picked up a new drive, and attached the old one as a secondary to transfer its data ....

BUT: The Admininstrator folder is locked ... even though it’s the secondary, non-boot drive, it still locks.

Funny part is, I was the only user of that HDD, and yet there’s separate ‘BroncoBuff’ (me) and ‘Administrator’ user folders. There were no passwords or security of any kind, and there is ~20 gb of data there despite the '0 mb.'

I tried the Command Prompt, but it's locked there too.


Anybody ... ?

 

[Broni]

You need to take ownership of those folders/files.
You're not saying what Windows version, you're using, so:
XP: http://www.winxptutor.com/ownership.htm
Vista/7: http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/wind...ership-to-explorer-right-click-menu-in-vista/

 

[johnb35]

Chances are you need to run a disk diagnostic on that drive before you can get access to those files. Did you by chance get an error on the blue screen listed as "unmountable boot volume"? That just means there are errors on the hard drive and they must be fixed first. What brand of hard drive is it?

 

[BroncoBuff]

Broni, THANK YOU! Your 500th post fixed the problem, I blew right past the roadblock.

I would like to know however: Why were there any roadblocks? I was the only User, and had no security.


Johnb, it's a 3 or 4 year old Seagate 500 gb, model #ST3500630AS. I can't read the blue-screen, it flashes by too fast. I ran all the utilities I had, but there were bad sectors regardless. Thanks for the optimism though.

 

[Broni]

Your 500th post fixed the problem

Hahaha...glad to see it fixed

As to why....ask Bill
Seriously, I've seen this issue many times before.
For some reason, Windows will not recognize the ownership of your old files, even if you're the very same owner...

 

[tlarkin]

The Administrator account is the built in system admin account that Windows uses. By default there is no password on it, but you would have to log in and set one.