This post originated from an RSS feed registered with .NET Buzz by Peter van Ooijen. Original Post: Salvaging the contents of a (Dell) XP home disk Feed Title: Peter's Gekko Feed URL: /error.htm?aspxerrorpath=/blogs/peter.van.ooijen/rss.aspx Feed Description: My weblog cotains tips tricks and opinions on ASP.NET, tablet PC's and tech in general. Latest .NET Buzz Posts Latest .NET Buzz Posts by Peter van Ooijen Latest Posts From Peter's Gekko

Friends of mine fried their Dell family box. The fan outlet had been blocked to long so the poor thing died. They carted in a new one; the new models seem to anticipate on overheating, as they have a very cool air inlet on the front side as well.

Anyway, I was asked to salvage the contents of the old machine. I took our family Dell and set to work. Some observations which might be of help to others:

• At first sight the hard disk of an old Dell is connected with a short IDE ribbon cable. This is not a standard cable, after replacing it with a standard cable the drive becomes invisible to the machine.
• It's no problem to attach the extra disk to the secondary IDE.
• The My documents folders were all set to a private visibility. This is handled by the NTFS file system and keeps working when the drive is in another machine.
• To be able to read these folders you have to take ownership of the folder. This is handled in an advanced page of the folders property .
• XP home does not show this property page by default.
• When you run your machine in safe mode, (press F8 at boot) the desired property page does show up and you can take possesion of the drive.

The main lesson I learned is that under the hood XP home is even more like XP pro than I knew. Googling around I found many a suggestion to install all kinds of scary tools or perform bizarre rituals. No need, it's just a (safe) boot away.