Old Hard drive, New computer

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Rattlebrain

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My old computer died. The mother board crashed. Sooo..... I went and bought a new computer. The hard drive in the old computer is 80 gig and I put it in the new computer. It all works fine except one thing. I have about half that hard drive filled up and it will not let me delete or format it. I keepes saying something to the effect of Access denied. Write protected. There are a few things on there I would like to get but they are not that important. I did have more than one logon. My wife had one and I had one. Please help. I would like to use this drive just for storage, Nothing more.
 
I have tried the format utility and have downloaded a program that was supposed to do it and it still comes up the same. "access denied"
Please help me out if there is something else I can do. I am not computer illiterate, just not an expert.
 
i dont supose your using norton antivirus are you as if you have and the norton recycle bin is enabled it wont let you format, if so go to recycle bin right click goto properties then goto norton protection and turn it off for the drive you wanna format
 
It has to do with ownership and access to the files. I would go to the help and look up how to assign ownership to your new user names.
 
can you boot into safe mode as administrator?

if you can, you can then change ownership
 
If you are using WinXP you need to put the winXP disk in your computer when you first power it on and boot from the CD. If you've never been inside your BIOS and played with the settings chances are your default boot order is:

1. Floppy
2. CD-Rom
3. HD

or if you don't have a Floppy then

1. CD-Rom
2. HD

If you have messed around in the BIOS and have possibly changed the boot order, then you need to make sure CD-ROM is your first boot device.

So put in your WinXP CD and at one point it'll say "Press any Key to boot...." and make sure you are paying attention because it only stays there for like 5 seconds.

From there it's basically self explanitory and it'll boot from the CD and all instructions will be displayed for you there. There should be no way you get an ACCESS DENIED message from there.

This will ERASE EVERYTHING though so if you got stuff you still need to get then you need to make that drive a slave and access it like that.
 
Do it the old fashioned way through DOS. Reboot and hit F8 until a screen comes up with the words Command Prompt. Use the arrow key, go down to this and hit enter. Now you should be able to type format c:. When it finishes, reboot with your Operating System disk in the CD-ROM Drive, and take it from there. Make sure that you have the boot sequence with the CD-ROM drive in front of your Hard Drive, otherwise it will skip right over the CD-ROM and attempt to boot from your Hard Drive.
 
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