Folder Locked-Unlocked It

Hello,

A friend has an external drive on which she locked some folders and now cannot remember the password she used.

She did not use a 3rd party utility to do this. I was thinking that maybe there is some way I can attach this hard drive to my pc and remove the permissions.

Is that possible? If so, how do you do that?

Thanks!

 

More details

Hello,

I am trying to help a friend recover some data. When he originally described his problem it sounded like he had encrypted his folders and I advised him(after researching) that that would not be possible. Then he gave me the full details and it sounds like something that I should be able to help him with:

He had a computer running Windows XP and he had set administrator privileges on a few folders. These folders allowed only him(the administrator) to access those folders. He did not encrypt the folders. He backed those folders up to an external hard drive.

The XP computer crashed. He now has a Windows 7 computer and he cannot access those folders that had administrator privileges on them. They are highlighted in green and when he tries to open them from his new computer he gets the message "cannot open: user does not have the access privileges."

How do I help him get access to those files? Thank you.

 

I do hope you are not trying to do anything illegal.

That said, you may be able to access the folders via a linux os, like a linux live cd/usb.
You can also try accessing the folder permissions as an administrator in windows 7 and see if you can alter them.
Try creating an administrator in windows 7 with the EXACT same name as the one that created the permission, try to access the folders using it, or the permissions to alter it.
IF that all fails, go back to an xp machine and create an administrator with the EXACT name of the admin that created the permissions, and try to access it and/or its permissions now. If that doesn't work, try changing the name of the pc to match the one the permissions were written on.

There should also be a way to use dos to rewrite/edit the permissions, but for the exact code, I can't help you.