Data Recovery - Please help... (I've tried everything!)

[sarahville]

Hi guys and gals,

Please help!

My hard drive crashed some time ago, and I've since bought a new hard drive and connected the old one as a slave. The old one was running XP Home, and my new one is now running XP Pro.

I've managed to recover almost all of the old data (phew!), EXCEPT everything that was in my Documents and Settings folder (such as my Favorites and my Outlook data). The problem is that my main User Account ("Sarah") was password-protected, so now I can't access the Documents and Settings folder for my user account. When I have a look in DOS mode, the "Administrator," "All Users," "Default User," and "Owner" folders appear, but "Sarah" is completely invisible, as if it has been deleted (though I've no reason to believe that this is the case).

I've done a lot of research and have tried a lot of things. I've "taken ownership" of my Documents and Settings folder (http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=308421). I've tried this: http://www.tweakxp.com/article139897.aspx. I've set up an identical user account (same name, same password) on my new, master XP drive, but it makes no difference. Nothing has worked

I'd be sooo grateful for whatever help anyone can provide. My last resort is to send the drive into some professional data recovery company, but that requires spending money, which sorta goes against my morals .

Thanks so much,
Sarah C.

 

[weswes]

Know wat sarah ? i've just posted a similar topic just few days ago...coz i needed to retrieve ( My documents ) ...well first thing ...DONT PANIC......

There are Data recovery software , the one i tried and i strongly recommend is ( R-tools ) u could get it at http://www.r-tt.com/ , though its not free , so u figure out wat u could do...they offer u the demo ....Just go to the ( Downloads ) section and download the R-studio demo

Anyway let us assume u got the full version , now connect ur new hard drive as master , and the old one as slave , read the R-studio manual......and get back ur data !! u cant imagine wat could this tool do

Let me know if u got stuck using the R-tools

Hope that helps

regards

 

[tribalsun]

Download and burn a copy of Knoppix to disc, make sure you "burn image to disc" and not make a data CD. Knoppix is a bootable Linux distro that runs entirely off a CD and it's 100% free. You can boot into Knoppix and use the built in CD burning tools to copy your files. Since you will be working in a Linux environment you will not be bound by Windows rules and permissions and should be able to view these files. I've used Knoppix myself as a recovery tool for a friend of mine, it's fantastic.

Hope this helps ya.

 

[antirem]

Im not sure how you might be able to use this becase im not sure how bad your old hdd is scrwed up. I wrote this for a previouse post and you will need to adapt it yor problem. What i would do is set the old HDD as master again. You then would boot into command prompt off a windows 98 boot disk. You should put the two programs I will talk a bout on it.

There are many tool to get and audit passwords. I will teach you using pwdump2 and john the ripper. Download pwdump2 and john the ripper online. Put those files on a thumb drive and boot the computer into command prompt (aka no windows) You can do this in windows as well by opening up command prompt but im not sure if you need to admin rights already to grab what you need so it might not work in in windows (i know i cant run saminside w/o admin rights) Goto the folder with pwdump2 in CMD. Type in "pwdump2 > crack.txt". What you just did is copied the hash files of the passwords. There has to be a way the computer can check to make sure you have the right password when you type it in so it saves it on your PC as a hash. A hash takes plain text, encrypts, and then scrambles it. Go home and drag the crack.txt file into the main folder of john the ripper. Get back in cmd get to the main folder of john the ripper and type "john crack.txt" Now you get to wait for john to crack the password. You might just wanna start this up at night so your not checking it every 15 minutes. It will take a few hours usually. You can check the status by pressing enter. Once its done it will tell you all the users names and passwords! So dont think you can protect yourself with a flimsy windows passwords there extremly easy to crack!!!

I hope you can use this in your situation! I dindt wirte all of that ^^^ for this post but it should work!