External Hard Drive Problem

[Digital Guerrilla]

Here are the particulars on this external hard drive.

1. The hard drive is from another machine (laptop) the operating system was Windows XP Pro the laptop was password protected but the former owner knew the password. So there are no problems with access concerning a password.

2. The operating system that the external hard drive is being used on is Windows Vista currently Home Edition. The ownership has been taken over by the "Administrator groups" and includes all sub files in the hard drive. In other words ownership is total and complete for the entire hard drive.

3. Access to the hard drive is not an issue-the issue is accessing the media files particularly video files. I have tried opening the video files in both Real Player and Windows Media. Neither of the mentioned programs can open the video and the error is access denied. The video files are in regular video formats nothing usual the media program just can not access them.

It has me scratching my head because I have never encountered access being denied after taking ownership in this manner. I have done this several times to salvage a hard drive from a laptop or desktop. First time for everything.

Any ideas?

[Andrew]

First, you may want to try VLC to play videos (probably won't help, but can play more media than real or WMP).

Right click on file you want to play. Is it read/write only attributes?

If you really want to view them for some reason you could also try a liveusb of ubuntu and see if VLC (once installed) can play it. I had no problem playing videos in ubuntu from winxp partition (ubuntu on SSD and winxp on hdd).