Data Recovery

If you set a drive up so that the there are 3 users. Each has a password and the files are private from eachother (ie. One user can't access anothers users my documents or my music). Well lets say the power supply goes out.

If you pull the hard drive out to do a data recovery (just pulling info like all the music and photos off of it) to put the data on a new computer will it be inaccessible because the users in Windows XP made their folders private.

So If this does happen and windows doesn't let to recover user data from the last hard drive becuase of your settings, is there a way to get around that.


I'm just curious, i never know if i'll have to deal with it.


Lets pretend we all know how to do standard data recovery, just so we don't go over basics.

let me see if i get your senario right

you have pc #1 with whatever amount of users and permissions on it - lightning hits the box or something and for whatever reason the box doesn't boot or windows fails to load so you can't get in at all, not from safe mode or recovery console

you have pc #2, you insert pc #1's hard drive in to #2 as a slave drive or whatever, at that point whatever permissions were on #1 can be overwritten and accessed by any administrator account on #2, therefore salvaging the files by providing yourself permissions to see them and move them off the #1 drive to the #2 drive or burning them on cd

the only problem you will have are files / folders which you may have encrypted, this cannot be accessed unless you have the public key saved somewhere, but rarely anyone uses EFS at their home

so in short, your disaster recovery will work fine if you throw the drive into another box where permissions will be void and useless since it's a different o/s managing everything this time around, these permissions don't carry themselves throughout hardware changes