So, given that Christie had work (and at least $50 in un-backed-up iTunes music) on the hard drive, acknowledging (or even jumping to the conclusion) that the computer might be dead, dead-dead, unbootable from a CD or anything else-dead… was kind of sobering. I didn’t have another computer I could put her drive in, and expect it to boot. (I no longer open the machine Cratchit sold me: I’ve already nuked the BIOS and started one fire in there, and so all involved agree that it works fine the way it is.)
I thought it might be worth a shot to buy a USB hard drive enclosure, although I was pretty sure that Windows would identify it as a Windows drive that it didn’t have permissions on, and I’d have to maybe boot into one of those Linux CD systems that gleefully ignores NTFS permissions. If that happened, hey, I’d still have that hard drive enclosure, and I have a spare drive, so bonus toys for me. (Never call a hard drive enclosure a toy in front of Adam and Becky, by the way: they were markedly disappointed.)
But I digress. Best Buy was all out of their $45 enclosures, but Circuit City had plenty of $35 ones, so Best Buy just lost a customer for life. (Okay, 12 hours at least.)
The surgery was painless, and Windows did recognize the files on the drive. I tried to open C:\Documents and Settings\Christie, and boom… it said “Access is denied”. I googled around, and discovered that while Windows will respect the permissions that are already on there, it won’t prevent any admin from changing the permissions of any system. So I can’t see it, but I can change the rule that says I can’t. That makes no sense to me, but after 45 seconds Christie’s data was available to me.
I created a new profile for Christie, and copied all her data over. Yay.
My laptop looks a little loney on her desk, and attaching it to a USB hard drive, her desktop sound system, and an iPod nano doesn’t make it seem any happier. But it’s a solution that works for now.
