Can't read HDD in Windows 7

[shamrin]

I have a customer's Dell Dimension 3000 here from which I want to remove the hard drive and image it. The problem is that Windows 7 won't recognise the drive. It will pull up in My Computer without details or a proper icon but the drive can't be opened (it errors out as "Drive Inaccessible"). The drive boots and runs (XP) in the host machine and I can see it if I mount it under Ubuntu. My guess is that it's an MBR issue or possibly with the NTFS.SYS file on the drive but when I think about it, I can't figure out why W7 would be sensitive to this and not XP.

If anyone has run into this, I would appreciate some advice.

 

[angry_geek]

Is there a hdd password set on it? Or is it encrypted? If either of these are the case, you'll have to remove that security before you can do anything. There are other possibilities too, such as a bad partition table or other damage. You should first check for possible encryption. If there is none, I would try booting from a live cd and imaging that way.

 

[othersteve]

Yeah; I'd say try some low-level partition deciphering tool such as GetDataBack or R-Studio and see if they don't pick up on the drive's presence. If that doesn't work, I agree with angry_geek about trying it out in PE.

 

[shamrin]

Is there a hdd password set on it? Or is it encrypted? If either of these are the case, you'll have to remove that security before you can do anything. There are other possibilities too, such as a bad partition table or other damage. You should first check for possible encryption. If there is none, I would try booting from a live cd and imaging that way.

I was thinking along the same lines as you and Othersteve. It's not encrypted, if it was I wouldn't be able to see it in Ubuntu. But now that you mention it, if the permissions on everything were set at some ridiculous thing like only System and a named users, that would probably give this kind of result.

I did create an image using ShadowProtect's live CD. I assume it works because when I mount it it says all the files are inaccessible just like the disk, but that still a little disconcerting.

UPDATE: AHA! That's it. User has set the permissions on the whole drive to just System and himself so when you mount the drive in another Windows machine it's inaccessible. This probably explains all his file sharing problems as well.

 

[seedubya]

Users should never be allowed to fsck with permissions

 

[parker.casey]

I was thinking along the same lines as you and Othersteve. It's not encrypted, if it was I wouldn't be able to see it in Ubuntu. But now that you mention it, if the permissions on everything were set at some ridiculous thing like only System and a named users, that would probably give this kind of result.

I did create an image using ShadowProtect's live CD. I assume it works because when I mount it it says all the files are inaccessible just like the disk, but that still a little disconcerting.

UPDATE: AHA! That's it. User has set the permissions on the whole drive to just System and himself so when you mount the drive in another Windows machine it's inaccessible. This probably explains all his file sharing problems as well.

Not what I was expecting!!