“Permission denied” - Data recovery in Windows XP

June 26th, 2006

Due to some reason my Windows OS is not working now. So right now my harddisk is a device with data but no working operating system. I plugged in the drive at the friend’s machine. I am able to access all data (picture, text data, etc) in D, E, .. drives, all data in C drive can be accessed except in folder “C:\Documents and Settings\anant” which is the administrator profile (Username). The Error message I get is “Access is denied”.

I am accessing the data in my harddisk by connecting to my friend’s PC and making my harddisk as slave so that my drives are viewed in his My Computer. My PC also had 2 other profiles ( non-administrator profiles) which can accessed.

Please give me input on how I can access my administrator profile.
- Anant

This has occured because that folder was created on an NTFS file system volume by using a some other installation of Windows XP, and then accessing from another Windows XP and the security ID doesn’t match the security ID of the owner of the folder and so you cannot open.

To resolve this issue, you must turn off Simple File Sharing, and then take ownership of the folder. The steps are as follows:-

  1. Turn off Simple File Sharing:
    1. Click Start, and then click My Computer.
    2. On the Tools menu, click Folder Options, and then click the View tab.
    3. Under Advanced Settings, click to clear the Use simple file sharing (Recommended) check box, and then click OK.
  2. Taking Ownership:
    1. Right-click the folder that you want to take ownership of, and then click Properties.
    2. Click the Security tab, and then click OK on the Security message, if one appears.
    3. Click Advanced, and then click the Owner tab.
    4. In the Name list, click your user name, Administrator if you are logged in as Administrator, or click the Administrators group.
    5. If you want to take ownership of the contents of that folder, click to select the Replace owner on subcontainers and objects check box.
    6. Click OK.
    7. You may receive the following error message, where Folder is the name of the folder that you want to take ownership of:

      You do not have permission to read the contents of directory Folder. Do you want to replace the directory permissions with permissions granting you Full Control? All permissions will be replaced if you press Yes.

    8. Click Yes.
    9. Click OK, and then reapply the permissions and security settings that you want for the folder and the folder contents.

Disclaimer: I do not guarantee that this will save your files. All I can say is that I’ve done it successfully on dozens of machines.

Filed in Ask Jayant, Windows Vista

38 Responses to ““Permission denied” - Data recovery in Windows XP”

  1. Phoenix Says:
    November 25th, 2006 at 9:42 am

    Thank you so much! I bought a external hard drive, and swapped it with the drive in my laptop. I then reinstalled windows and when I went to copy my old files back it kept saying “Permission Denied” or “Access Denied”. I spent forever trying to get it to work, unsuccessfully, then I found this article. Thank you!

  2. Jayant Gandhi Says:
    November 25th, 2006 at 10:45 am

    @Phoenix:
    Its good to hear that it was of help to you :)

  3. MJ Says:
    December 11th, 2006 at 6:15 pm

    hey this worked for me too, but I had a bit more work than expected. I had to manually take control of every file inside the orphaned Vista boot folder on my existing XP pro partition. I had deleted and merged space back into XP pro by using PMagic. However, I never lost the ability to boot from my old XP and I am glad too.. ;) I found the instructions ** G:\boot\bootsect.exe /nt52 ALL /force — “G:” is my virtual DVD drive that I ran my Vista ISO from; your drive letter may be different — ** for removing the dual bootloader menu after deleting Vista (research before diving into a blackhole — lesson learned here!). Anyway, I am Vista free for now. Thx…..

  4. earl dixon Says:
    December 13th, 2006 at 8:05 pm

    thank u so much. been trying to do that for months.
    earl in roanoke.

  5. Dan Says:
    January 8th, 2007 at 9:42 pm

    You saved my life, thanks so much!!

  6. Bill Mooney Says:
    February 22nd, 2007 at 12:41 pm

    Only place I found on the web who knew how to do this, per the Microsoft website it is pretty much impossible. Thanks to you I recovered a large number of irreplaceable digital pictures of friends and family.

  7. Jayant Gandhi Says:
    February 24th, 2007 at 6:10 am

    @ earl dixon, Dan, Bill Mooney, MJ:
    Its nice to hear that it was of help to you :)

    @MJ:
    You could have also followed my instructions on safely removing Windows Vista.

  8. How can I disable Simple File Sharing in Windows XP Home Edition? « Jayant Kumar Gandhi Says:
    March 1st, 2007 at 8:59 am

    [...] I currently have a problem you have posted a message about. I have a hard drive with xp pro w/ sp2 that i am trying to get some files off of so i set it as slave and put it in a computer with xp home w/ sp2 installed. Every time I try to access the admin folder it tells me access denied. I tried to do what you said about turning off simple file sharing but the advanced button is not there. I go to my computer,tools,folder options, and then the view tab. there is an advanced box but no where in there can you turn off simple file sharing. I went to Microsoft’s knowledge base they say nothing about it either. I’m not sure if you have seen this before but any help you could give me would be great. - Jeff Thomas [...]

  9. Will Says:
    March 7th, 2007 at 10:05 pm

    HELP! - I am trying to do this, but can’t find the “Use simple file sharing (Recommended) check box”

  10. Jayant Gandhi Says:
    March 10th, 2007 at 7:09 pm

    @Will:
    If you are unable to find the “Use simple file sharing (Recommended)” check box, it is because you must be using Windows XP Home Edition. Please use the instructions at the article “How can I disable Simple File Sharing in Windows XP Home Edition?“. Hope that helps.

  11. Geoff Says:
    April 9th, 2007 at 7:23 pm

    I forgot to add, taking ownership of the entire drive results in the Documents and Settings folder being unavailable, apparently! It’s still listed there as a hidden folder though.

  12. KKR Says:
    May 1st, 2007 at 5:57 pm

    Thanks for rhe recovery info. Very helpful. KKR

  13. Jayant Gandhi Says:
    May 14th, 2007 at 4:03 am

    @KKR:
    Glad to know it worked for you.

  14. Malik Says:
    May 30th, 2007 at 9:04 pm

    Hi

    I’ve seen these general instructions one or two websites trying to rid myself of Vista WINDOWS folder (don’t get me wrong, I appreciate the effort you put in to help people) and tried them to no avail.
    I decided to have another go, just for the heck of it, and voila!…I got an error message.

    Followng your guide, when I’m on step 6 of TAKING OWNERSHIP, I get the following error message:

    “This security ID may not be assigned as the owner of this object”

    It gives me this error after trying to apply the attributes to every single file, and I don’t want to go through ALL that clicking again .

    Could you please advise on what else to try, as I think I’ve exhausted this method.

    Thanks a lot

  15. Malik Says:
    May 30th, 2007 at 10:50 pm

    Ah, I can finally breathe easy again. I kept fiddling around and somehow, over a period of about half an hour of clicking individual folders and selecting God knows what options, I’ve finally managed to get rid of the Vista WINDOWS folder.

    Maybe I was doing something wrong the whole time before this.

    Oh well, many thanks Gandhi for this guide of yours on how to get rid of that nuisance

  16. Marmot Says:
    June 17th, 2007 at 7:16 pm

    So ends the ill-fated existence of Vista on my HDD.
    Thanks a bunch, man.

  17. uh-oh- Urgent: Lost folder permission after OS reinstall - TechEnclave Says:
    July 7th, 2007 at 11:09 am

    [...] permalink hmmm i re-installed windows Xp and now dont have a control on Vista folders so cant delete those btw you should try this : “Permission denied” - Data recovery in Windows XP � Jayant Kumar Gandhi __________________ Remove avatar’s …save bandwidth Blog [...]

  18. jagadeesh Choudary Says:
    July 13th, 2007 at 1:05 pm

    Hi

    I have two accounts UserA and UserB with admin privilleges. UserA created a file xyz.doc and by default UserB can access this file. Now I want by no means want the UserB to have access to my file xyz.doc with out removing his admin privilleges. Please help in this regard.

  19. David in California Says:
    July 17th, 2007 at 9:31 am

    You’re a life saver. Many thanks, man.

  20. prapawon Says:
    July 27th, 2007 at 6:27 pm

    thanks a lot you’re save my life too! I’ve an important project and cann’t access for a while
    so thank you very much

  21. philldo Says:
    July 29th, 2007 at 1:53 pm

    You
    RAWK!!!

    I’ve been trying to figure this out my too long. Thanks for the great tut!

  22. Edward Says:
    September 13th, 2007 at 3:43 am

    Great! It solved my problem.

    I merged two partitions, one with XP another with Vista, and I couldn´t erase some of the remain Vista system files. I tried unsuccessfully SecureClean, MoveOnBoot, PowerDel, Unlocker, Linux and everything else you could imagine. If I only could imagine it was so easy… didn´t install so many junk apps in my system.

    Thanks!

  23. Venkata Naveen Lopinti Says:
    September 29th, 2007 at 11:28 am

    Thanks a ton!!!! It worked for me for one of my clients…You deserve the earth!!!!Thanks again!!!God bless you !!!

  24. mostafa Says:
    October 14th, 2007 at 9:30 pm

    thanks a lot, this roblem was a nightmare for aro. 6 mnths till i find this discasion at least :)))

  25. Weber Says:
    November 11th, 2007 at 9:36 am

    Thanks very much. I successfully deleted boot folder but I can’t still delete bootmgr file on C drive. Any idea?

  26. johnny Says:
    November 26th, 2007 at 10:51 pm

    I love you…you are the best..you save my ass…omefegeee

  27. Ray Says:
    January 8th, 2008 at 10:55 pm

    Hi guys,

    Thanks for posting the tip to get rid of Windows Vista. Since I haven’t seen it yet, here is something that may help people delete the Windows Vista folder from their computer. If you are still getting “accessed denied” after following the steps above, what you want to do is make sure you have changed the ownership to your administrator account with “replace owner on subcontainers and objects” checked. Then apply the changes.

    Go back to the security tab for your folder and ensure “Full Control” is checked, then go the advanced tab. Check both “Inherit from parent the permission entries…” and “Replace permission entries on all child objects…” then apply.
    If all goes well, you should be able to delete the entire folder in one swoop.

    I’m not sure if there are redudant steps but this worked for me. Cheers.

  28. Cannot access part of my hard drive Says:
    January 11th, 2008 at 9:58 pm

    [...] Thanks everyone for their answers, but I actually figured it out through this link. “Permission denied” - Data recovery in Windows XP � Jayant Kumar Gandhi Ben11 has another link posted very similar to this one. Good luck to anyone who has the same problem. Timothy [...]

  29. Arun Says:
    March 21st, 2008 at 8:21 pm

    Thanks a lot.

  30. Anders Says:
    April 18th, 2008 at 3:14 am

    Thanks a lot. Some back and forth in the security settings, but finally found the way to inherit full control all the way to AcGenral.dll ;)

  31. Inder Singh Says:
    April 22nd, 2008 at 9:10 am

    hi,

    Thank you for your nice article post.I was facing with a “Access Denied problem” from few days.As i by mistake removed the permission on D drive for all users including “Admin” :) And was not able to recover back.But now i read this and found that io can just reverse whaatever i did just in same way i didi it.And it works and iam able to take data back.

    —-
    Thanks & regards
    Inder Singh

  32. Johnny Says:
    April 28th, 2008 at 8:55 am

    Many thanks for this…

  33. Pyroqo Says:
    July 28th, 2008 at 11:53 pm

    Hi,
    This worked a treat and saved a friend from losing all his files … still had to reformat though lol, but better to reformat after i have managed to save all his music pics and most importantly of all his favourites he has ammassed over the years :)

    Just a simple thanks for your time to publish the information :D

    Pyroqo

  34. MoBreezy Says:
    August 15th, 2008 at 4:29 am

    Thank you so much! Everything was stored under my profile folder. I was dying over here!

  35. Tom Says:
    August 19th, 2008 at 3:08 am

    Thanks, this was a life saver.

  36. Sam Says:
    January 13th, 2009 at 4:08 am

    THANKYOU.

    Thought i’d try out permissions for setting up a restricted user account, didn’t work how i planned so i changed it back and files were goooone completely. tried system restore, files appeared, but also weren’t really there. The disk space was used, the thumbnails were present but it was just icons, so i couldn’t do anything with it.

    So thanks heaps :)

  37. Ranga deshapriya Says:
    February 18th, 2009 at 10:04 pm

    thak u verymuch for ur comment

  38. Aaron Dizon Says:
    March 3rd, 2009 at 9:24 am

    This really helped backuping my cousin’s files before reformatting his PC. Thanks!

Leave a Reply