ssuperraven

Hi, To start, I am fairly clueless with computers, so please excuse the lack of technical language and knowledge!!

I had an old hard drive that I needed to get some pictures off and was sold a kind of external hard drive thing. They put my hard drive in it, and said that I would be able to get the information off it if I formatted the hard drive when it was plugged into my computer.

When I went to format it, it told me that it would delete everything, so I cancelled it. The problem is that I cannot view ANYTHING on this hard drive. It is telling me I do not have access to it?! If anyone could help I would be very grateful.

Many Thanks in advance

lunatic59

If you removed this from a PC running Vista or Windows 7 it's most likely NTFS which means that permissions are assigned to files and folders. You will need to mount that drive on a PC running either the same OS or later and have administrative privileges to get at the files.

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ssuperraven

I have now managed to copy/paste the files, but it says I am not authorised to view the contents. Any ideas?

lunatic59

If you have administrative access you can right-click on the files and go to the security tab and take ownership.

BlueBiker

Wow, that's among the worst advice I've ever seen. You're lucky you didn't format it, because then you'd need forensics (time, money, and prayers) to recover the files.

If you're not authorized to view the files, I can't see how you could have successfully copied and pasted them. Doesn't sound right.

That's plausible.

This is probably overkill (and potentially dangerous for a newby), but Parted Magic is a free bootable CD/USB version of Linux that's designed for doing maintenance and recovery on machines and drives.

ssuperraven

I give up!!!! Will take it to a man who can! Thank you all for your help though

BlueBiker

Good luck with it Raven!