As you would be an 'administrator' you will have access to the files on the
external hard drive. The method for taking ownership (if needed) will depend
on the operating system you install and how the drive was formatted (FAT
formatted drives have little security, NTFS have more) but as administrator
you will have ability to get the data. In any case it is not difficult but
as it depends on exact conditions any advice before you are ready would have
to many if and buts to be useful. After you get setup and if you are having
trouble seeing what you think is supposed to be there, get back with the OS
you have installed, the type of formatting that the external disk has and
check back for 'taking ownership' under those conditions.
I am assuming that the drive was not 'encrypted' (not very likely), if it is
you are basically out of luck.
From my experience, the menus and guidance are different depending on what
type of installation disk is involved. An 'upgrade' disk tends to expect
that you want to keep the old data, an OEM disk seems to think you want to
start over with a clean machine, and a 'boxed' full installation tends to
also expect you to want a clean install but makes it a bit more obvious how
to keep the old data.
Also if you have an available computer you could skip the step of installing
a drive and reinstalling the OS and just connect the new external hard drive
to that machine to get the data off and then put the drive back in the
laptop and rebuild from scratch.
Michael
LSordo said:
Studler -- yeah I know I can't be distinguished from a thief, which is why
if
there's a service that does this sort of thing, I can use the will and so
forth to establish that I'm llegit.
Michael Walraven said:
You should now have a working computer and a working external hard drive.
You might need to 'take ownership' of the external hard drive in order to
read the data there.
Ooooh. I could do this. So the password wouldn't block me accessing her
files when the orginal harddrive is in the external enclosure? What's
this
"Take ownership" step?
If you decide to just install a new OS, watch out for options that are
presented to you, it will be very easy to end up partitioning or
formatting
your data away if you answer a question wrong.
So there is a way to install a new OS without wiping the system? I've
installed a new OS before and feel comfortable doing so, but I don't
recall
ever seeing a step saying "preserve files on disc" or the like. Is this a
fairly easy thing to do?
Many many thanks for all your help.