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Question

Help with hard drive files...

Jan 7, 2015 2:28AM PST

Hello. First things first - nice site. Had a browse through the forum and couldn't find an answer to my problem - but not sure how to put it into words. Kinda a newbie to this sort of thing so idiot boards and big drawing pens at the ready...

I owne(d) a Packard Bell Imedia X2413 desktop computer that has died. Not booting but no issue with the hard drive as far as I can tell. It had a good life so not bothered about saving it. However all my music and itunes accounts (which I stupidly didn't back up) is still saved on the hard drive. The hard drive in question is a Seagate Barracuda 7200 (500 GB). I checked the hard drive and it was booting/powering up fine. So following advice on here I bought an Anker USB to SATA converter cable so I could transfer the files on to my new laptop.

Plugged it in, powered up fine... allowed me to read files no problem. The only issue is, when the hard drive was in my desktop computer I was working off two Windows XP profiles - a public one for my GF and an administrator one for me. All the files are readable from the public profile that my Girlfriend used, but I cannot find any files at all for the other. The latter of these had a password whereas my girlfriends one did not. Does anyone know what I am doing wrong as I cannot find any of my photos or music anywhere? I would have assumed it would be obvious and been in the "users" folder where there would be one lot for my girlfriends profile and another for mine (the administrators one). There are a load of files which are just numbers. The folders visible are as follows:
- 1f54dab4e7d973b1614edd4cb9c0f7da
- 92f948a7fe9da42482d687
- Downloads
- NVIDIA
- PerfLogs
- Program Files
- Users
- Windows

Any (idiot proof) help would be GRATEFULLY received. Thanks muchly.

Discussion is locked

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Answer
The first two are easy.
Jan 7, 2015 2:34AM PST

If you research that, you find these are leftovers from, well I know you can research but an easy delete.

As to those next, they are part of the system and there is no easy answer.

I suppose the - Downloads - NVIDIA - PerfLogs would be easy to target but one shouldn't remove the folder but what's inside as the folders are used by the system.

Program Files, Users and Windows are definitely part of the system so why not use the usual tools (Control Panel, User accounts) to manage that?
Bob

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Answer
OK, that's the cleanup angle. As to the PASSWORD
Jan 7, 2015 2:37AM PST
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Answer
Since the disk is now external ...
Jan 7, 2015 2:43AM PST

all you could possibly need are files from Downloads (only you know what's there and if you need it), special fonts you forgot to backup from Windows\fonts folder, files you stored yourself in Program Files (I have a subfolder that that contains all setup-programs that I installed) and your own files from the Users folder. For that last, you need to take ownership (see Bob's link, but adapted for the current OS on your laptop) or boot to Linux.

Kees