Moving user files from a salvaged hard drive while ignoring user rights

[pegasaurisrex]

Simply put, My mother dropped her karaoke PC onto a concrete floor. Afterwards the machine failed to post (luckily the machine was super old and I was running out of computer screws) and she decided to just get a new one.
She asked me to try and get some files off of it and I agreed. I threw it into my rig and was able to get it to boot, but she forgot her password. So I booted to my normal drive and when I tried to access her personal folder it was locked with the user rights thing and told me to just hit continue and be on wait for it to load anyways. This took HOURS, i went to bed and the next morning it wasn't even finished, and I'm convinced it was never going to
My friend said that I should try and move the files with CMD instead of explorer and when it comes to doing things like that I genuinely have no idea what I'm doing.
can anyone give suggestions on what to do?

other info
Hard drive is 1 TB and and it is 100% full
everything I need to save is in one folder with sub folders inside of it
My computer is windows 10 but the OS on the old hard drive is windows 8 (if that makes a difference)

 

[USAFRet]

Don't try to boot from that drive.
Install it as a secondary drive in a different PC.

Take Ownership is the function you're looking for.
https://www.techrepublic.com/blog/windows-and-office/quick-tip-take-ownership-of-files-and-folders-in-windows/

And yes, it may take a while. Do it in Explorer, and just let it run.
If you go down the CMD route, you can mess things up completely if you don't know what you are doing.

 

[pegasaurisrex]

Don't try to boot from that drive.
Install it as a secondary drive in a different PC.

Take Ownership is the function you're looking for.
https://www.techrepublic.com/blog/windows-and-office/quick-tip-take-ownership-of-files-and-folders-in-windows/

And yes, it may take a while. Do it in Explorer, and just let it run.
If you go down the CMD route, you can mess things up completely if you don't know what you are doing.

is there any way to tell how long it will take?

 

[USAFRet]

Don't try to boot from that drive.
Install it as a secondary drive in a different PC.

Take Ownership is the function you're looking for.
https://www.techrepublic.com/blog/windows-and-office/quick-tip-take-ownership-of-files-and-folders-in-windows/

And yes, it may take a while. Do it in Explorer, and just let it run.
If you go down the CMD route, you can mess things up completely if you don't know what you are doing.

is there any way to tell how long it will take?

Not really.

 

[pegasaurisrex]

Don't try to boot from that drive.
Install it as a secondary drive in a different PC.

Take Ownership is the function you're looking for.
https://www.techrepublic.com/blog/windows-and-office/quick-tip-take-ownership-of-files-and-folders-in-windows/

And yes, it may take a while. Do it in Explorer, and just let it run.
If you go down the CMD route, you can mess things up completely if you don't know what you are doing.

Slight road bump. something happened to the hard drive my computer will refuse to boot to my normal hard drive if the salvaged is plugged in at all. Im getting a USB hot swapping station and hoping that after I actually boot up, I can just cram that hard drive in and not have to worry... if that doesn't work then I will call it an overall bust

but just for the sake of warping this up i'm going to pick this as the solution because i'm confident that this was all I needed to do and I messed things up even more so on accident when I first booted to the drive to make sure it wasn't completely toast xD
live and learn, right?

 

[USAFRet]

A USB-SATA dock is very handy to have around, for situations just like this.
You power up the donor drive after the system is booted up.