Help finding files please???

[Wing Commander Fowler]

Hi there.

I'm normally pretty reasonable with this sort of thing but this time I am foxed foxed foxed..........

My friend has a dell latitude, given to her as part of her redundancy package when eirjet when titsy. So, as such there may be some administrator restrictions set from many moons ago.

It has recently died on her (I spent 3 hours stripping and rebuilding it this morning to no avail) and I am now trying to recover her precious pictures and video. I thought this would be dead easy as I have an external hard drive adaptor. I have fitted the hard drive into the adaptor and my laptop now sees data in windows explorer.

This is where the problems begin:

I can find work related word docs by searching ".doc". When I search for any of the following I get results only of images from program packages and windows itself: .bmp - .jpg - .jpeg - .mpg - .mpeg - .mp4

She is concerned for the valuable pictures and video of course.

I have looked through all of the several "my pictures" folders and found only sample stuff.

Some of the folders on the root state that I do not have permission to access - access anyway. I do this and don't see much of value.

I have asked and both stills and video camera are sony. I have ascertained that she used to allow sony to do the downloading for her. I have no idea either where the program stores the pictures/videos when it does its business.

I have also searched for *.dsc as I think sony uses this as the prefix for images but I am not certain of that.

Does anyone have any idea how to proceed from here please? This would make her very happy indeed as all of the kids photos are there with (you guessed it) NO BL**DY BACKUP!!!!! :ugh:

Thanx chaps.

[seanbean]

Try loading the Sony software onto your laptop and see if this helps find the images etc.

[purmus]

It may be that the folders on the hard drive are still password protected. You can get round this by taking ownership of the folders which should then enable you to see the documents that are not shared. The following link gives instructions on how to do this:

How to take ownership of a file or a folder in Windows XP (http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;308421&sd=tech)

[Saab Dastard]

Have you searched using More Advanced Options? By default, XP does not search hidden folders (bloody stupid).

In Search, after selecting Files and Folders, there's an drop down for More Advanced Options, and a check box for Search hidden folders (System folders should normally be checked by default).

If that doesn't help, ensure that your Windows Explorer is set to show Hidden and System Folders in the Folder Options list, then search manually through every single folder, in case the file extension is not one you recognise.

Bearing in mind that photos and vids are big files, you could narrow the search by checking the size of each higher level folder - if it is very big, it's worth searching, and don;t bother if it is small!

Another thing you could try is to do a DIR /S (see DIR /? for other options - sort by filesize or extension) piped to a text file which you could then trawl through, as it might be quicker than opening each file individually.

SD

[Wing Commander Fowler]

Sean - I'll try to ask her to find the sony software but if she can't even keep a backup of data not certain if she'll have a dedicated location for her software......

Have now set all the permissions which cured the access problems, have tried dipping into each of the folders checking first that the content size is reasonable but no luck yet.

Saab - I'm familiar with dir and dir/p in dos but have never searched for a particular file this way so don't know where to start with that one...... Can you even run a search in dos on a usb drive? I know it does have a drive letter but somehow thought it had to be in the bios as a device to be seen by dos. I'm more'n likely completely wrong. Was once before - 1932 I think it was...... That's right corrie was on....... :p

[bnt]

It looks like she has permission on her Profile, which is normal if there's a password on the account, to stop people getting in that way. It will not help to recreate the account and password on your machine, since it's locked by a long security ID (SID), not the name alone.

All her personal files should be under "X:\Documents and Settings", and I agree with the suggestion that you should take ownership of that whole folder, then change its permissions to Everyone:Read, so you can get the data off.

The situation is not quite the same as with a USB key, since keys are usually formatted with FAT or FAT32, which doesn't support folder permissions. An XP system disk must be formatted in NTFS, which has file- and folder-level security.

[Wing Commander Fowler]

Thanx to all of you for your help - Purmus and bnt were absolutely correct. I was playing with permissions and dismayed to see that despite setting them on the root of her drive and inc all folders and subs, each time I checked permissions on folders they had been excluded. In the end, through changing and changing and changing I found all the pics...... In one of the several users profiles under my docs/pics as you would hope to find them.

Many thanx guys - ya stars! :up:

[Gertrude the Wombat]

I am now trying to recover her precious pictures and video
Recover in exactly the same way as you would if the laptop had been stolen or someone had driven a truck over it - from the backup.

[Wing Commander Fowler]

Hehe! Backup indeed! She's got MY backup alright....... as I said there never was one :=

[bnt]

Just occurred to me: what if you could find that same model laptop on t'Bay, slot in that old HDD, and get your friend back up running as before? (Except for the permissions changes, which you might need to reverse first.)

[TheShadow]

I've got the laptop Hard Disks from two failed Toshiba laptops plugged into this HP Compaq laptop - via a USB kit ($20 at most/any computer stores). All data's retrievable.