'Access is denied' error opening a directory

Helping a friend whose various virus/hardware(?) issues led
him to a point where his hard drive is slaved into my
machine and we are pulling data off his disk and burning to CD.
Things were going fine until we hit 'Documents and
settings\Nicholas' where we encountered 'Access is denied'
(same result at DOS prompt). His user account was an
administrator with a password. Directories for other users
are fine (those had no passwords).
Properties shows 0 files, 0 directories, but he sure
there were many files there as of yesterday.
Tried skipping straight to a sub-directory (e.g.
doc&settings\nicholas\my documents) with no luck.
Could his password still be giving us trouble even with
the disk in my computer? Does this sound more like a
hardware/file allocation table issue? What are good next
steps (round file the disk, Scandisk, etc.)?
Thanks

Hi Patrick,

Follow the instructions in this MSKB article in order to take ownership of
files/folders to which you are denied access:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=308421


Regards,

--
Patti MacLeod
Microsoft MVP - Windows Shell/User

"Patrick" wrote in message
...
Helping a friend whose various virus/hardware(?) issues led
him to a point where his hard drive is slaved into my
machine and we are pulling data off his disk and burning to CD.
Things were going fine until we hit 'Documents and
settings\Nicholas' where we encountered 'Access is denied'
(same result at DOS prompt). His user account was an
administrator with a password. Directories for other users
are fine (those had no passwords).
Properties shows 0 files, 0 directories, but he sure
there were many files there as of yesterday.
Tried skipping straight to a sub-directory (e.g.
doc&settings\nicholas\my documents) with no luck.
Could his password still be giving us trouble even with
the disk in my computer? Does this sound more like a
hardware/file allocation table issue? What are good next
steps (round file the disk, Scandisk, etc.)?
Thanks