Thanks for that info, to you, and Mick Murphy.

In answer to your point one, I back up my data and I’m sure most users of
this forum do, but I think it is optimistic of MS to expect the average pc
user to do so.

On point 2 I made a disk image using Acronis run from the Boot CD and also
run from the App in Windows, and in both cases the original drive had 45.1
billion bytes of data and the image drive had 43.7 billion bytes of data on
it. Why are they not identical, and is it possible the Documents and
settings folder got missed off?

On point 3 I don’t have a Knoppix distro. I might try with Ubuntu or
another distro, or I might download Knoppix. In any case I’ll post the
result here.


"Malke" wrote:

>
> 1. How about restoring files about from backups? Oh, don't have backups? I
> guess that's Vista's fault, hmmmm?
>
> 2. Are you trying to image the drive? If so, do it from outside of Windows.
> Make the bootable True Image CD and boot with it. Make the image and store
> it on - obviously - a hard drive that is different from the target drive.
>
> 3. Or just copy the data from within Windows. You don't say what happens
> when you try but if you're getting "access denied" errors you can either
> take ownership of the files or boot with a Live Linux CD such as Knoppix
> and get the files that way. Note that this won't work if you actually
> encrypted the files. If you did, I hope you backed up your encryption keys.
>
> Take Ownership of a File or Folder in Windows XP [Q308421] -
> http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=308421
>
> How Do I Get the Security tab in Folder Properties? -
> http://www.dougknox.com/xp/tips/xp_security_tab.htm
>
>
> Malke
> --
> MS-MVP
> Elephant Boy Computers - Don't Panic!
> FAQ - http://www.elephantboycomputers.com/#FAQ
>
>