External Hard Drive Boot 2

[Googlymoo]

My previous computer recently kicked the bucket and as a result I have built a new system with all-new hardware. What I would like to be able to do is transfer the contents on my old hard drive to my new one, especially my music.

I purchased an enclosure and it works great in XP pro, however, when I try to boot from the external enclosure, I get the XP logo just as starting up and then the system reboots itself. Any ideas? I cannot transfer my files because they were all in the desktop and of course it is password protected.

 

[dberg35]

You should be able to just look at that drive in MY Computer and copy and paste them. If they are your files then you already know the password.

 

[kestrel1]

You wouldn't be able to boot from that drive as it was in a totally different machine. All sorts of things will stop it booting. Do as dberg35 says, you should remember your password. You could always try a Linux Live boot CD, such as Puppy Linux:

http://www.puppylinux.org/user/viewpage.php?page_id=1

You should get access to your files from there.

 

[Googlymoo]

Unfortunately copy/paste is out of the question, since access is denied because of file protection. The only way I could do something was to boot up from this drive (somehow) and then remove the password from the administrator account.

 

[kestrel1]

Have you tried my suggestion of using the Linux live CD?
I have just tried this myself & I was able to get access to all my files on my XP passworded partition.

 

[Googlymoo]

I'm not sure how to use Linux. Can you tell me more about this?

 

[dberg35]

You can download Ubuntu (Linux) burn it to a CD, put in the CD drive and restart your pc. When Ubuntu asks to install do nothing and it will begin to run from your CD rom. Here is a link for you to review.

http://www.frozentech.com/content/livecd.php

 

[kestrel1]

With Puppy linux, once it has booted from the CD, left click on the Disks Icon on the desktop. You only need a single click, not double. In there you will see your various hard disk's & CD rom drives. Click on Mount to mount the hard drive that you require access to. This should open the drive up & you should be able to browse the folders. If you have another hard drive installed & want to copy the files across, just mount the other drive & copy the files over. You can burn CD's as well if you wish.
I have found Puppy to be a fairly easy Linux Distro to use & it is only an 80mb download for version 2.16.

 

[Googlymoo]

Thank you Gentlemen for this Linux suggestion. It has worked like a wonder and I have been able to recover all my files in the password protected folder. I appreciate your help. Kestrel1 was right, Puppy was fairly easy to use even to someone with no prior Linux experience.

 

[kestrel1]

Yes, Puppy Linux is a very nice little OS. I have been playing around with it recently & found it to be very good indeed.
Glad you have found it useful & have managed to get your files back.