Recovering data from corrupt vista drive

[Geffen]

My friends as me to look at his broken laptop and the cause of the problem is a corrupted hard drive. I'm going to replace the drive with a new one but have been asked if i could copy his "my Documents" folder if possible. When i try this it say the files are protected so is there way to by pass the protection so i can copy the folder.

The drive is Vista OS drive and i do know the login details for the system if that will help.

 

[SiriusB]

How did you try to access the files? If via another Windows machine you may need to take ownership of the files. The Internet is chock full of guides on how to do this.

Alternatively you could try a Linux Live CD like Mint or Ubuntu. Nothing installs and they should be capable of reading NTFS and will let you copy the data to a different HDD or USB drive.

If/when you manage to do it, slap your friend for not having done regular backups!