After two years of Win7 use I'm still not certain I understood this. Maybe someone can recommend me some reading with in depth explanations (not the beginners 'how to' stuff..)! Assume: You have got a drive containing your C:\ and in particular C:\Users folder. You recognize having some problem with Win7 on PC A and want to compare the data with a copy of the data stored on your drive D: (or the NAS or some other PC). In case this would matter: In this environment we just have several PC's connected by a LAN there is no Server. We just have accounts with identical names on the PC's. This allows the users to access shared data on other PCs (e.g. Desktop and Notebook). Security is not really a point in this LAN accessibility matters! As Win7 is no longer running stable on PC A you remove the disk and connect it to some other Win7 - PC B - for a Byte-per-Byte compare against the data copy. To my knowledge this will fail for all folders contained in C:\Users. This seems true even if the user names for the accounts are identical on PC A and PC B. This can be solved: Just use 'Take Ownership' and you will gain access to all information. After you compared the data you are fully satisfied with the stuff on the copy and move the disk back to PC A to investigate the Win7 problem maybe something you can fix very easily... As I understand this will not be possible: Previous 'Take Ownership' will prevent Windows when booted from this disk (now back in PC A) from gaining access to C:\Users. And some of the information stored there is needed for Login! Questions I hope to find an answer in the reading: 1) Is C:\Users the only part of drive C:\ affected by this problem. Are there any other regions where I do not have ownership after moving the disk from one system to another? 2) Is there any way I would be able to prevent this? An operation that would allow, as a kind of preventive maintenance, a later reading on some other PC? 3) I assume there must be some way to navigate around the restriction. Backupprograms seem able to handle this! Personally I do not see any advantage by this behaviour. - Starting the disk under a non Windows OS will allow full access. - Users with the same name can access data in C:\Users over the LAN. Why not when mounting the drive locally? Why do I have those questions? I had today a desktop PC having a mirrored system drive (RAID 1). RAID information broke somehow, only sees one of the two drives at any time. Only solution seems to erase one of the drives before you can add it to the RAID again (AMD, RaidXpert). But before I erase one of those disks I would like to know whether they both contain the same information - might be one was dead for a few days! To install a new disk and load a backup to it to restore the original users allowing analysis on the system itself seems just a tedious task for such a simple problem! And manipulating the RAID to allow boot from a single disk and subsequent compare of the other seems just a bit daring!

Hi, May I know what RAID array do you deploy? Since there are methods for different RAID such as RAID 0, RAID 1,RAID 5, RAID 10 and so on, please contact RAID manufacture for assistance to recovery the data. Here are articles and guide can be referred to. Ownership http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc779180(v=WS.10).aspx How to recover a RAID 0 disk array after losing the arrays metadata http://spench.net/drupal/resources/raid0 RAID data recovery service http://www.securedatarecovery.com/raid-data-recovery.html Note: The information on RAID recovery may help you.Ivan-Liu TechNet Community Support

Hi Thank you. I used the RAID 1 array offered by BIOS of the motherboard. This is an AMD BIOS product and administration is done by a Webclient (RAIDXpert). The Ownership reading you recommend is for Servers. I don't think this knowhow can be applied for Windows 7 user accounts. Please note further: RAID recovery is not the topic I'm trying tounderstand... I just added this information, because I wanted to explain what I tried to do! My most important question is: How can I compare the two disks to find out which one conatins the correct data. I made some steps forward in this process - see the text I'll attach in a few minutes.

Since my last post I did some research concerning the above topic. The most important thing I had to learn was: A user being a member of the group 'Administrators' will not automatically have full rights. I suppose you get the full rights if you start an application with 'Run as Adminstrator' (Right-click on program instead of Left-click) but I think there is no way you can do this with Explorer! But it is still possible to get always full rights without taking ownership: If you log on as the 'Administrator' you will be able to read all files. And it does not even matter, if you use a different PC! So the most simple idea seems to enable the 'Administrator' account on PC B, login as Administrator and to attach both HDD thus gaining full rights to all files! There are several websites explaining how to enable the administrator account just search. Do not forget to turn off on access virus scanners on PC B during comparison and (if necessary) copy operations to check as many files as possible!

I haven't work with RAID arrays, so I can't offer assistance there. But I want to take issue with the following point in the first post: <<Assume: You have got a drive containing your C:\ and in particular C:\Users folder. You recognize having some problem with Win7 on PC A and want to compare the data with a copy of the data stored on your drive D: (or the NAS or some other PC). In case this would matter: In this environment we just have several PC's connected by a LAN there is no Server. We just have accounts with identical names on the PC's. This allows the users to access shared data on other PCs (e.g. Desktop and Notebook). Security is not really a point in this LAN accessibility matters! As Win7 is no longer running stable on PC A you remove the disk and connect it to some other Win7 - PC B - for a Byte-per-Byte compare against the data copy. To my knowledge this will fail for all folders contained in C:\Users. This seems true even if the user names for the accounts are identical on PC A and PC B. This can be solved: Just use 'Take Ownership' and you will gain access to all information.>> The important point here is that having accounts with identical names on multiple computers does not automatically equate to the same security principal having equal rights on each computer. The security system translates our "friendly" names into numerical security identifiers. Therefore, 'Fred' on computer 'foo' (foo\fred) is a completely different security principal than 'Fred' on computer 'bar' (bar\fred). From the security identifier perspective, you might as well try to match foo\fred and against bar\nancy. Sometimes the security system may recognize or grant permissions to any user from a trusted connected computer. But I don't recall ever having luck in overriding permissions on a \Users\** folder, unless I was able to use a local administrators token, which it sounds like you have done by taking ownership. I hope this information helps address the core question in this thread title: "How to understand the ownership concept of 'User' folders?"