Access denied when taking ownership of pass protected files... help!

[aaron7]

I have a PC here and need to backup the documents but the PC is too corrupted to boot. I slaved the drive off to my XP Pro sys, shut off simple file sharing, and took ownership of the folder. I can see the files in Explorer, but cannot open, move or copy them. I just get a Access Denied error.

I booted to safe mode and tried taking ownership of single files, and it just gives me an error saying access is denied!

Is all lost!

[Intuit]

Try taking ownership from/using SYSTEM access rights.

PSExec.Exe -S -I -D Cmd.Exe

From there, run FreeCommander2005, use XCACLS.Exe or cACLs.Exe.

When using those commandline utilities, always be sure to specify the /E and /G parameters.  You can really screw yourself otherwise.
Ex:  XcACLs * /E /G EVERYONE:F /T

Another option may be to access them from Linux.
If they are encrypted though, more steps are needed before you can decrypt them... certain files need to be recovered and copied to the new installation... username and passwords may need to match.  Need to re-read up on that.  I'll eventually want to do that anyway but let know if it's a necessity/priority for you.

Cipher.Exe command-line utility encrypts and decrypts.