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Hidden user account

post #1 of 8
4/6/07 at 8:40pm
Thread Starter 
A friend of mine has a Dell laptop that's given up the ghost. I told her to buy an external USB shell and I'd drop in the hard drive so that she could gain access to her old photo's and documents etc (she has her wedding photo's on it!) Anyway I dropped the drive into the new external case and it mounts fine in my wifes XP and I can browse the directory...but there's only a few user accounts listed and non contain "My Documents" so I'm assuming she turned on the hide account setting. The drives formatted in NTFS so I know that its technically possible but my question is then is there a way to 'hack' it so we can see the hidden data? If I can't I might try installing her drive into my wifes Dell i6000 and trying to boot her copy of XP and get her password to then copy the data to another drive or DVD etc but it'd be easier if there's a way to view the data on the external drive first.
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post #2 of 8
4/7/07 at 7:01am

Re: Hidden user account

Andrew:

Just a swag here but have you tried: attrib mydocu~1 /s /d
from a command prompt ?

Maybe you'll see the other accounts this way. Then you can change the attributes to un-hide them.
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post #3 of 8
4/7/07 at 12:37pm
Thread Starter 

Re: Hidden user account

That didn't work either.
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post #4 of 8
4/7/07 at 1:52pm

Re: Hidden user account

Did you first change into the drive that the 'external HDD' appears as (D:,E:,F:, etc...) ?
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post #5 of 8
4/8/07 at 8:50am
Thread Starter 

Re: Hidden user account

Yes.
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post #6 of 8
4/9/07 at 3:03am

Re: Hidden user account

It's possible to boot from USB too in most modern computers. It's a setting in the BIOS where you set the sequence of devices it tries to boot from. In other words, you might be able to boot her drive directly from the external case.
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post #7 of 8
4/10/07 at 7:54am
Thread Starter 

Re: Hidden user account

I tried booting from her drive but it just bluescreened on boot. The answer was so obvious though that I nearly missed it...Linux/OS X don't care about NTFS file permissions so I was able to view the hidden folder on my Mac with ease and copy the data to a DVD for her.
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post #8 of 8
4/10/07 at 8:00am

Re: Hidden user account

Quote:
Originally Posted by Andrew Pratt
I tried booting from her drive but it just bluescreened on boot. The answer was so obvious though that I nearly missed it...Linux/OS X don't care about NTFS file permissions so I was able to view the hidden folder on my Mac with ease and copy the data to a DVD for her.

How's that for airtight security
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