File permissions and Outlook Express files

[Lenp]

I have an HP XP system that crashed, with a bad mother board. Power supply is good, all peripherals and cards pulled, still no POST. I lashed the hard drive up to a Win7 box with a USB adapter.....

Hell hath no fury.....
The Win 7 system was able to read the drive, but it would not open any PDF files on the drive. The PDF files were fine on the system drive but the XP drive's were blocked by the 'Access denied' message from Adobe. I read all the info about Adobe and Microsoft permission settings, and much of the on line info says the same thing through different 'experts'. There does seems to be an issue with long file names on a network, that didn't apply but I tried the fix anyway. I even loaded another .PDF viewer and tried the XP drive on another computer and I was still locked out. There was never a problem on the original XP system. Maybe because it was created on one system and transported to another, that was the panic that Adobe saw but that defies logic. I thought that PDF was Portable Document Format!!!

Microsoft is completely nuts on 'permissions', and if they are set wrong even though it's your file, you cannot do anything. No copy, paste, rename, delete, open,...Nada! I reset the permissions to everyone and the system user name, and still, the .pdf files were affected. So, maybe something is screwy with Adobe, or the files. All the 'experts' tell you is the same thing that Microsoft tells you, but it simply doesn't seem to work on external drives.

There should be a way to turn the security off... so please, software gurus, let ME worry about ME. I don't need or want your help!

Well, thanks to YouTube, I found a little blurb about a free download that allows you, by some act of smokeless black magic, to take ownership of a file that Windows, and or Adobe wouldn't allow. This 'Take Ownership' program really did it, but it only would do a a single file, or a group of about 10 files, at at time. I needed to do it ...way too many times, but it worked. I was able to access and transfer the XP PDF files onto the new system. So far so good with this part, I think!
'Take Ownership' is a registry hack that installs on the right click menu in Windows Explorer and when it is used a command window pops up briefly, too brief to read. That's all, and it's done!
Get it here http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows- ... -in-vista/

Next issue was the email. The Outlook Express files are stored as a ####7.dbx file. It seems that every mail program uses a different file style and why no standard, like a text file, I'll never know. If Outlook Express could be put on the new system, all might have been quickly solved, but it does not run beyond Win XP, and it will not even install on Win 7.

Again, I found more software, called undbx. It reads the .dbx file and converts it to an .eml file. It did run a batch but halted a on an email it didn't like? I just deleted it since it was old and of no real consequence. All went well again. The advantage of this conversion is that the .eml file is a bit more friendly since it can be read as a text file and may be more easily converted, someday! Even though the messages are not in the mail program, they are accessible and I can get the text and addresses if needed. It does not preserve the complete mail directory structure, but they are at least in the last level folder so it isn't a ton of scattered files.
Get it here:http://sourceforge.net/projects/undbx/

Now next is to try to get the outlook contact address .WAB files so they can be used by Thunderbird, but that eludes me right now. I can copy/paste them from the .eml files as needed, but since many are aged they may never be needed.

So even with a 'BACKUP' all is not well and an image copy or a compressed backup would have been more disastrous. I guess that even with another board in the old box, XP probably wouldn't run right, or at all, unless it was a same vintage board.

I really believe that a simple file copy, in spite of its difficulty, may be the best way in view of the recovery issues I've had! Just put all the valuable data in one main folder, on the root, and copy it to external storage, off site preferred!
End of the story....

I hope this helps someone. Comments or suggestions are appreciated!

I AM QUICKLY GROWING TO BE A DEPRESSED, BITTER, INTOLERANT, DISAGREEABLE, AND CANTANKEROUS OLD MAN THAT REALLY IS GROWING TO HATE AND DESPISE ALL THIS 'TECHNOLOGY'!

BRING BACK THE BIG GRAY ROLODEX WHEEL!

[cae2100]

BRING BACK THE BIG GRAY ROLODEX WHEEL!

*looks over at my stone tablets* guess I really need to get with the times.

Thanks for the useful info, As for your issue with having to change ownership one file at a time, maybe this would help.
http://windowsitpro.com/windows-vista/t ... mmand-line
Just use *.pdf as filename in it and it would change ownership of all of the pdf files in that folder, just run it from command prompt within that folder.

As for the other issues your having with the outlook software, I think that they change their software about as often as the sun rises just to mess with us really, but then again, I believe that's all microsoft's software.

[Lenp]

Thanks! I guess I missed that command line gem when searching for the magic oil!

I'll bet the software I mentioned 'Take Ownership' just puts lipstick on Takeown, making it more user friendly and installing it as a menu addition. It looks like a batch file when it runs, with a brief pop up CMD window, but why it only runs a few files is odd!