Hello everybody, I know I'm a newbie and I'm probably posting this in the wrong place, but feel free to hate on me for it.

I've just encountered a bit of an unusual problem. There was a power outage at my mother's house, and a surge which has killed the power supply, motherboard, AND cpu of her XP machine which I built in 2000. I figured it lasted long enough and she'd been wanting a laptop for a while, so I helped her buy a new machine (Vista of course) which she now knows how to connect to her big monitor, printer, mouse, and keyboard. The one issue is she had several pictures etc saved on her old machine. I picked up one of those dynex USB hard drive enclosures, popped the old HD in, hooked it up, no problems. I browse to her folder, suddenly I'm being told I don't have permission to view the folder, and to click continue to get permission. I do, and the predictable UAC confirmation screen comes up and I click continue.. then it hangs. I've tried playing with the security settings (right clicking, menus, etc) and have all the rights granted for her account, yet it keeps telling me I don't have permission to open those folders. Is there something I'm missing, or am I gonna have to take the hard drive to a friend's XP machine to save all these holiday/baby pictures?

You may be able to still take ownership of the files and folders with the Vista computer.

http://www.technobeta.com/posts/add-take-o...a-context-menu/

In XP

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/308421

I had the same problem using a Vista computer. My fix for this was to use a Older XP computer that was still using IDE connections. I hooked the drive direct into the second connection on the ribbon cable and this made the drive the slave in that computer by pulling the jumper out of it. Then i was easily able to take ownership of the files and folders then and move then to the main drive on that computer and then burn the files to a DVD.

SRX660

I thought for sure that change ownership command would work, but it got hung up on some generic application data files and hung up (Unfortunately she used the My Pictures folder, and I can't get past Documents and Settings\HerAccountName, so there's a lot of useless junk I have to gain ownership of, I think some of it is corrupted). The only way I could regain control of the system was by turning off the harddrive (system literally unfroze and was back to action as if nothing ever happened). But now when I try to access it explorer stops responding until it's shut off.. I booted the computer with it on to run it's disk check utility but it froze on me twice. This drive has been on it's way out for a while now and I'm surprised it's lasted this long, but I know the path to the files I wanna save yet I don't know any fancy scripts or tricks to get them.

Well, that old hard drive is officially dead, and as it turns out the pictures are still stored on her camera's memory stick

I really appreciate the help though.