Regaining access to folders marked private....

[CharlesPage]

Heres the deal:
1)A fatal exception occures when Windows attempts to
boot, so I cannot log on.
2)Dell's support idea is to reimage the disk.
3)That will loose of the information on the disk.
4)So I have the disk hooked up to another machine.
5)However, I cannot copy Documents and Settings because
people have marked this stuff as private with Windows XP
HOME EDITION.
6)Of course, no one wants to loose their stuff when I
reimage the disk.

What can I do to regain acess to the folders that people
had marked as private?

Thanks,
Charlie

[Mike Mulligan]

Where did you come upon the notion that imaging a disk will cause
information to be lost? A disk image is a bit-by-bit copy of a hard disk.
Nothing is lost.

Perhaps you're misunderstanding Dell -- they might be asking you to do a
repair install of the operating system. This should not cause you to lose
your user files (e.g. the contents of My Documents). You will probably have
to 'take ownership' of your files (and so will other users of your system),
but this is a routine procedure.

A repair install is commonly suggested by tech support because it's much
easier -- for them -- than to troubleshoot your problem. Most tech support
people wouldn't know how to diagnose your problem anyway, in my opinion.

How about posting a little more detail about your problem. What were you
doing on the computer before the trouble started? Any error messages? Any
recent changes to your system? Let us have a go at it.

Mike Mulligan

"CharlesPage" > wrote in message
...
> Heres the deal:
> 1)A fatal exception occures when Windows attempts to
> boot, so I cannot log on.
> 2)Dell's support idea is to reimage the disk.
> 3)That will loose of the information on the disk.
> 4)So I have the disk hooked up to another machine.
> 5)However, I cannot copy Documents and Settings because
> people have marked this stuff as private with Windows XP
> HOME EDITION.
> 6)Of course, no one wants to loose their stuff when I
> reimage the disk.
>
> What can I do to regain acess to the folders that people
> had marked as private?
>
> Thanks,
> Charlie

[Roger Abell [MVP]]

If the machine you have it hook up to speaks NTFS then
you only need to take ownership, which will prompt to
have security permissions tweaked, which you would OK.
Take Ownership see XP Help and Support, or
http://support.microsoft.com/?id=308421

--
Roger Abell
MS MVP (Windows, Security)
MCDBA MCSE W2k+NT4
"CharlesPage" > wrote in message
...
> Heres the deal:
> 1)A fatal exception occures when Windows attempts to
> boot, so I cannot log on.
> 2)Dell's support idea is to reimage the disk.
> 3)That will loose of the information on the disk.
> 4)So I have the disk hooked up to another machine.
> 5)However, I cannot copy Documents and Settings because
> people have marked this stuff as private with Windows XP
> HOME EDITION.
> 6)Of course, no one wants to loose their stuff when I
> reimage the disk.
>
> What can I do to regain acess to the folders that people
> had marked as private?
>
> Thanks,
> Charlie