Hi everyone,

I have a bit of a problem with file permissions in XP home.

A colleague has asked me to fix her notebook which had lost access to most functions in windows. It turned out that somebody/thing had disabled ALL services in windows, disabling just about everything. I turned them all back on but something was still blocking all network communication apart from internet explorer so I installed a copy of win2000 in a different directory so that I could copy her files off to another machine which I had already zipped up in XP and saved to c:\.

Unforunately, the .ZIP file inherited her permissions and now whenever I try to copy it in win2k I get access denied.

I am logged in as administrator in w2k and have also tried to re-create a user account with the same name and password as in XP to access it but this doesn't work either.

Unfortunately installing w2k to the same partition has nobbled XP, so I can't simply boot XP and reset the permissions. Also her "My Documents" is also locked so I can't just zip the files again.

Is there any way that I can access this file?
Any utility that can reset file permissions?
Can I extract the UID and password hash from XP's SAM and somehow create a cloned user in 2000 that will inherit her XP permissions?

PLEASE CAN SOMEONE HELP!

thanks,
Oli.

You could probably boot from a Knoppix CD and use the Linux NTFS driver to get at the data.

http://www.shockfamily.net/cedric/knoppix/

Thanks Andy,

I'll have a go with that tonight.

Before I start the 700mb download, does anyone know if knoppix will read files irrespective of what NTFS permissions are set?

cheers,
Oli.

You should be able to just take ownership of the file as an Administrator and then give the appropriate access to the file.

Creating users and passwords will never help. Users have unique IDs. Even deleting and creating a user with the same name will never work. Forget cloning the user.

I am logged into 2000 as a user who is an administrator but not but I can't even view permissions of the file. Would it be different if i used the actual administrator's account?

Is this because the file system recognises that the w2k administrator is different from the XP administrator?

If I was able to so this, where can I find the option for changing ownership of the file?

cheers,
Oli.

I'm no expert on this, but I run the NT server here at work so I'm at least partly qualified.

You possibly can't view permissions because you don't have permissions To take ownership (win2k) right click -> Security Tab -> Advanced button -> Owner Tab.

The owner will probably show up as a big number (the ID) since the Win2k install will not know about it. Select your Win2k Admin user and apply and you should be right.

And yes Linux NTFS won't give a damn about file permissions if you have to go to that extreme.

Boot disk that will let you reset the Administrator password

(But just taking ownership would be easier.)

Hi,

taking ownership of the file worked.

Thanks everyone for your help!
Oli.