Plugged Lappy hard drive into my desktop but it says access denied

[New Art Riot]

Hi
I want to put Win7 on the laptop, it's currently running vista.

I had some stuff to back up so I thought I'd plug it into my desktop machine and transfer the stuff across.
It's NTFS and uses SATA so it's picked it up fine but every time I click it it's saying I:\ Is not accessible Access is denied.

I put the hard drive back in the laptop fired it up and it loads Vista perfectly.

Can any one help me out?

[burner1]

I think you need to take ownership of the drive mate, I know this is what I have to do with XP machines.. not sure how you do that with your OS setup but probably similar.

If you google take ownership of drive with xxx.. where xx is your OS.

[evilsatan]

I think it is done using disk management in control panel, right click the HDD and look at the options. Did you have a HDD or TPM password on the drive? this is different from a windows password.

[New Art Riot]

Thanks for the responses. In the end I whacked in a liunux live cd and mounted the drive then I was able to copy the stuff over.

[DejaVu]

What burner said is bang on.
When you save files on a locked (passworded) user account, it will create permissions to the file that also need the username and password to access. This is a feature of the NTFS file system.

With Administrative accounts on Windows 7 you can remove the permissions, but doing so can take ages as it has got to do every single file.

The easiest way to do this would be to load up Vista on your laptop and remove the passwords from all user accounts. You then, should be able to access the drive from any machine.

Also look into BitLocker Drive Encryption - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia@@AMEPARAM@@/wiki/File:BitLocker_icon.png" class="image"><img alt="BitLocker icon.png" src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/d/de/BitLocker_icon.png/100px-BitLocker_icon.png"@@AMEPARAM@@en/thumb/d/de/BitLocker_icon.png/100px-BitLocker_icon.png as well just incase that feature has been activated - if it is, obviously you will need to deactivate that also in Vista.

But seeing as you've bypassed it with Linux - this is a wasted (yet useful) post!
Check the files before wiping the drive though, they may still be unreadable!