8 replies to this topic

[jackson6612]

Hi

Today I bought a used notebook PC. It's HP made. Before that I was using Dell Latitude X300. I don't have that Dell with me. It's broken. I have cloned the old hard disk (which was an IDE) onto the hard disk of new HP (which is a SATA one). Cloning procedure was successful. But the windows does not boot now. It does start and reaches the point where the windows starts loading but suddenly I get a blue screen for a split second and the computer restarts, and so on. I had Win XP Pro. What do I do now? Please help me. I have exams in next few days. I need access to the data of that hard drive.

Thanks.

[Alexander]

Windows will either deactivate itself (requiring reactivation) or not boot up at all with a cloned disk or partition, it is set in such a way that is very assuming driver and location wise.

You could reinstall Windows if you have a disk and use the recover option, your data will still be available just in a backup folder or whatnot. Or access the drive physically from another computer, for example installing it as a slave drive and not a primary so it can access its files.

Further you can use Linux or a bootable environment (such as with a USB or CD) to access a distribution that can view your files. There are quite a few options.

[jackson6612]

Then, I'm facing a big problem. My old hard disk was using password, the username password. Even if I use it as a USB drive I cannot access My Documents folder. Can I?

I was reading this article: Cloning a Windows System to Different Machine | Knowledge Base

Please tell me what I can do to save my life. I have exams starting after 8 days and I have many of my notes on that hard. In the past I had two Dell latitude x300 notebooks and I used to interchange hard disks between them. I didn't face any problem at that time, probably, because both computers had the same hardware.

[Alexander]

Passwords are completely irrelevant to other Windows installations (as long as that broken copy of windows is not "running" it cannot enforce any security on those files)

You can use any Windows installation disk to recover, or a Linux live distribution on a USB as mentioned, can you do either?

[jackson6612]

Right now I have two computers with me. One I'm using these days has been borrowed from someone, and other one is is the new one I bought yesterday.

I have connected the old hard disk as a USB drive but as I said I could not access my documents residing under my username because I was using password. Here it is: http://img851.images...121/unledwq.jpg

My username was simply "Administrator". Please tell me some way to access the documents.

EDIT: As you can see there is "continue" option in the scan picture but I have checked it's all in vain!

[Alexander]

I've never ran in to that problem before, it must be because the newer version of Windows adds security (inheriting the drive's securities even though it is foreign.)

You should use an operating system of which doesn't apply this, such as Linux. For example Ubuntu will run as a live CD, you could technically use something such as GParted I believe to access the NTFS partition which is smaller. It is a partitioning distribution that includes NTFS mounting access. You could then copy off the appopriate files.

[WingedPanther]

Using a Linux live-cd version can probably access the data, since it doesn't care about Windows security.

[jackson6612]

Thank you, Alexander, WingedPanther.

I was able to access almost 80 percent files; though I would like to create a clone of old hard disk because I had installed many useful programmes there. I used Acronis Image to access those files.

I genuinely thank you guys, especially Alexander. It would have been very difficult without your help.

Best wishes
Jackson

[Alexander]

You are certainly welcome.

Unfortunately programs often use the registry hive, and often other specific locations to take care and count of installed programmes. You may not be able to run them again unless the actual Windows installation was running itself that had installed them. You could however manually export settings, if their settings are in a file (install programme, and then copy it over for example)