Computer FilesTHE FIX:

Connect the drive to a friend’s laptop (or a sympathetic lab administrator) and ask them to access the files.  The person must have Administrative Rights on the computer.  Almost everyone’s personal laptop account has administrative rights.

Background:

My brother’s friend’s computer just up and died at Stanford.  He had an article due and was sweating that he couldn’t get it back.  He did everything right.  He got an external hard drive enclosure and put the drive in the enclosure.  He went to the library and hooked it up to a computer.

He tried to go into his “G:\Users\USERNAME\Documents” folder (in Vista and 7 – in XP its G:\Documents and Settings\USERNAME\My Documents”).  However, he got the “Access Denied” error when he tried to go into “G:\Users\USERNAME”.

The Reason Why:

He was logged into a library computer as a “User” or a “Power User” without administrator permissions to files.  The files on his hard drive belonged to “USERNAME” on his laptop and not to “SCHOOL USERNAME” on the school computer.  Thus the library computer was respecting the file permissions.

So why doens’t this problem rear its ugly head with a jump drive?  I think its because removable media is marked as for everyone.  My guess is that User folders and system folders are the only ones protected.

Hope that helps.

–Ben

Sources:  TechSpot, Microsoft.com