Owning Files

[jephph]

I've been trying to fix my friends computer. It went into an infinite restart loop. After trying a few things, I decided to just back up his files and reformat. The problem is, his hard drive won't give me access to his My Documents folder. Probably because he required a password to log in. Now, I'm doing this with and external enclosure, so there's no way to put in his password. Anyway, I tried this thing where I booted in safe mode, then the os let me transfer the files after i declared that I owned them. However, now I can't find the files anywhere after booting back in normal mode. I know they are here somewhere, because they are using up my hd space. I'm afraid to reformat his hd now, because I'm not sure I'll be able to find the files now, and even if I do, I'm not sure it will let me transfer them back. Anyone know what I could do?

 

[DelJo63]

understand, My Documents is relative to the user-login, specifically

\documents and settings\Joe\My Documents​

if Joe is the login and you 'take ownership' as Admin or under another user id
the files will be inaccessible.

go back to Safe Boot and GIVE ownership back to Joe

 

[jephph]

No, they are actually accessible. I found them. I guess I figured out a new way to hack into password protected files ^^