Windows 7 - ignore security when reading external drive

Question

My system hard drive on an XP computer kind of failed (random corrupt sectors). So i got a new harddrive and am trying to recover the files. The filesystem is NTFS.

The system i'm trying to use when recovering the files is Windows 7. I'm obviously an admin on this box. The last data i'm trying to recover is stuff in the Documents and Settings folder.
I'm using a SATA to a USB cable thingy so that I just plug it in as an External Hard Drive.

The problem:
In Windows Explorer when i try to copy the data, I keep getting prompted with Security warnings and error messages. It keeps telling me i have to change the owner permissions of the folder and all it's contents. If i tell it to change all the files and folder permissions it takes a really long time because it has to recurse through all the folder contents to change the permissions.

Is there a way for me to ignore the file permissions when doing this?

thanks

Answer 1

No, there is no way to ignore NTFS permissions.

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The best you can get is to change all permissions for the drive and all its contents. At least in XP there are two options:

• Inherit from parent the permission entries that apply to child objects
• Replace permissions on child objects

If you enable both once, then the permissions of every "child object" (file or folder) will be replaced with "Inherit from parent".

The first change may take a long time, but further ones should be really fast because only one object's (drive root) permissions will need to be changed - files inside will have "inherit" set and need no change.

Answer 2

Other answers are incorrect. You do need administrative access on the machine you're using, but not the disk from which you want to recover data. I have successfully used this method twice to recover the data from dying disks where writing anything to them may have caused further damage.

1. Download a driver called AccessGain.
2. Attach the disk to recover but do not access it, it's safest to set it as read only now using diskpart (there are plenty of tutorials on how to do this, search for it).
3. In Windows 8 an up, restart using advanced startup options to disable driver signature enforcement. In Windows 7 hold F8 at boot to see that option. This is temporary - only for the next boot.
4. Set the disk to read only again, as above.
5. Install the AccessGain driver and attach it to the target drive, as per its included instructions.
6. Recover your files to a different drive.
7. Detach and unload the driver as per its instructions.
8. Reboot normally to ensure your machine enforces driver signatures again.

This enables your system to believe it has full access to the drives on the disk, without modifying any security descriptors, or any other potentially damaging write operations.

Further options for ensuring your drive is mounted read-only.

Answer 3

You can use Robocopy in backup mode to copy files that you do not have permission for, but I suspect you will still have to take ownership of the new files.

However, since they will now be on the Sata drive it will not take as long than it would to do it via USB.

Answer 4

OS X has an option to ignore File Permissions on external drives, but Windows is too retarded for such Usability. I hope Windows will prove me wrong in future, because this UAC popups annoys me every time, which escalates in takeown changes for hundred thousands of files, which damages the disc in the long run.

http://www.cnet.com/news/solving-read-only-conditions-for-external-hard-drives/

To prevent such errors from happening, OS X includes a setting to ignore permissions on external drives, so all files on the drive should be fully accessible regardless of their permissions settings.

To set this option for external drives, select the drive on your desktop or in the Finder sidebar, and then press Command-I to get information on the drive. In the information window that pops up, go to the Sharing section and click the lock to authenticate. Then check the box to "ignore ownership on this volume," or toggle it off and then on if it's already enabled.

For Windows, there is AccessGain: http://www.hobeanu.com/accessgain/

It's basically a driver, which just ignores the NTFS file permissions.

Answer 5

There does not appear to be a way for any version of Windows to ignore NTFS permissions (yet).

Your best bet would be to use another OS (Linux or Mac) to mount the drive and read data off it this way. These OSes use 3rd party drivers to read/write to NTFS, and they often ignore all but the most simple read/write/execute file permissions even if there is no option to ignore everything. I was able to access all my files with no file permission issues on a few NTFS drives which would give me all kinds of access/permission errors when it was mounted in Windows.

On Linux, you can use the NTFS-3G driver to mount an NTFS volume.

If you're on a Mac, it can mount an NTFS drive as read-only which should be enough to pull your data off. If you want write access, check out Paragon NTFS or Tuxera NTFS. They're both paid software, but OEM's (Seagate, WD, Toshiba) often provide a free version which will only work on their branded drives of you visit the downloads section of the OEM.