Accessing former XP drive as second drive under Windows 7 without Chowning

RE: Accessing former XP drive as second drive under Windows 7

Removed primary drive from XP machine and hooked it up via usb adapter to a machine running Windows 7. Isn't there a way to read this drive without changing stuff, like ownership?

This suggests not: http://social.answers.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/vistasecurity/thread/0ec97143-db51-450e-bef9-88ce29e100db

but I'm not satisfied. I'm trying to recover files from a failing drive. The last thing I want to do on a failing drive is start writing stuff to it. I need a copy only operation.

Perhaps there is a way to create a user and match the admin sid on the target drive.

Solution 1:

Windows Vista and 7 has a complete different security model then XP. Furthermore, when installing Vista/7 the OS is not aware of previous users that was on the old harddrive, and therefore it will treat the old harddrive as alien.

Solution 2:

I would backup the files off the drive, and reformat as FAT32, then restore the files back.

You can't convert NTFS to FAT32. PartitionMagic or similar might be able to do it, but I don't know about those - YMMV.

Edit: I would then hook up the drive to an OS that doesn't support or play nice with NTFS partitions. I know that Mac OS X doesn't play nice - I can see all manner of files you can't normally see, and then copy them off. I'm sure it's also possible to recreate this under linux. You might be able to get yourself a Live CD (or a partition, or VM) and then mount the drive with your USB caddy, and finally copy the files you're chasing off!

No guarantees this will work however.

Solution 3:

If you have plenty of disk space available, you could try taking a disk image/snapshot using something like ghost/true image

If the drive is failing, that obviously complicates things, but most imaging tools have options to ignore errors and copy what it can. However this make it harder to determine what parts have been copied correctly.

Once you have the image, you could try restoring this to a real drive or partition or to a new drive in a Virtual Machine (eg Virtual XP) and then use the take ownership of the files.