Windows 10 – Taking Ownership of Hard Drive Does Not Reveal Files

hard drivepermissionswindowswindows 10

I have two Windows 10 machines. A desktop and a laptop.

The laptop has completely died so I want to take the data off the laptop drive and copy it over to my desktop.

So, on my desktop, I can see the folder listings but it's saying the folders are empty. The account on the laptop isn't the same name as my desktop.

I've tried taking ownership of the folders I want, I've told it to inherit permissions, I've set my local account to have full control, etc. But nothing. I can only see the folders.

Windows properties shows well over 300 MB in the "Users\myuser" folder from the laptop drive. So it knows there's data there.

Any ideas on what I can do differently?

I'm 99% sure I didn't have encryption on the laptop but it wasn't always used by me. But again, I don't think that was ever turned on.

Best Answer

It kind of tricky to do it under Windows. Try to boot desktop (with connected laptop's hdd) from this LiveCD. It is linux base operation system that runs in memory without touching real HDD's. When it started, it will go to command prompt by default, don't be scary, just type startx and hit 'Enter'. When GUI desktop loaded, go to menu->System->Show filsystems and remember device name that match your laptop hard drive and partition marked as NTFS (It could be something like /dev/sdb2). In yellow window (terminal) type: mount /dev/sdb2 /mnt/windows (correct /dev/sdb2 to the name you found in previous step). If you will see some warning about unclean shutdown on windows partition, run ntfsfix /dev/sdb2 and try to mount again. If mounting didn't throw any error messages, look on the left side of taskbar for icon that has sign "File manager" (when you mouse-over icons), run it and navigate to /mnt/windows. If your files survived then you might see and copy them (just mount your desktop HDD to /mnt/backup ). When you would copy files to desktop's HDD, keep them in /user/Public folder to avoid later confusion with permissions. When you done with coping, issue in yellow window(terminal) commands:

umount /mnt/windows; umount /mnt/backup
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