Password woes

Igol

I hope someone can help and please bare with me coz its a bit of a tale.

I was playing around trying to use XP to password protect a folder on my secondary HDD, what I in fact managed to do was create a log in screen that required a password when I next turned on the PC.

Password I used wouldnt work and dispite the various tricks and solutions I ended up having to reformat my primary HDD and reinstall XP. I'd unpluged my secondary drive as I didnt want to loose my photos (the folder I was trying to password protect).

I reconnected this drive and while everything else is there I get access denied when I try to open the photos.
Anyone got any ideas how I can get back into it?

diable

What are the permission on the folder you are trying to access?



oh and a bit late now but if you aren't sure how to do something then don't do it...........

amcluesent

>Anyone got any ideas how I can get back into it?<

You first need to take ownership by Administrator of the folders on the second HDD and then remove any limits to access.

tronator

Igol wrote: »

I hope someone can help and please bare with me coz its a bit of a tale.

I was playing around trying to use XP to password protect a folder on my secondary HDD, what I in fact managed to do was create a log in screen that required a password when I next turned on the PC.

Password I used wouldnt work and dispite the various tricks and solutions I ended up having to reformat my primary HDD and reinstall XP. I'd unpluged my secondary drive as I didnt want to loose my photos (the folder I was trying to password protect).

I reconnected this drive and while everything else is there I get access denied when I try to open the photos.
Anyone got any ideas how I can get back into it?

I think you made a big mistake. If I'm right in thinking what you did, then you encrypted a folder and when reformatting your harddrive you deleted the certificates needed for decrypting the files.

You should have asked here what to do before reformatting. You should now shutdown your computer and not booting into Windows until you recovered the certificates. The more you write to the hard disk the more unlikely it is to recover the needed files.

Maybe I'm wrong and you just restricted access to this folder to a certain user. After reformatting that user doesn't exist anymore and you locked yourself out. Only an Administrator could change the permissions again.

Your description doesn't make it clear what you really did. I would download an Ubuntu LiveCD on a different PC burn it on CD and boot from it. If you can access and open your files this way, everything will be fine. If not, then you'll need an expert who can try to recover the certificates and subsequently recover your files.

tronator

amcluesent wrote: »

>Anyone got any ideas how I can get back into it?<

You first need to take ownership by Administrator of the folders on the second HDD and then remove any limits to access.

As written a few minutes ago, before we're not sure what the OP really did, (s)he shouldn't do anything on this computer.

closed

If the photo's existed on your primary hard disk at some point, you could try running this on it.

http://diskdigger.org/download

Always keep at least 2 copies on different media