I have a system that was running Vista that the laptop failed but the hard drive is in good shape. Using a Windows 7 system; I set the vista drive using a external USB device to read it. Windows does recognize the drive and assigns it a drive letter, how ever when I go to access the drive I receive the following error. <drive> :\ is not accessible access is denied. Disk manager sees the drive and reports drive as healthy. I try to take ownership of all the files and it will work to about 80 % and state that it can not take owner ship of all files and still unable to access any of the files. I am able to see the deleted file on the hard drive using winundelete. this seems to be a windows security issue with ownership of the drive and files. Also I forgot to mention that Microsoft essentials is able to scan the drive and you can see the files names as it scanned I have tried a couple of recovery tools with no luck. Thank you for any ideas

Have you tried taking ownership of the whole drive? If not, click the Windows Orb (Start) > All Programs > Accessories and right-click Command Prompt, then Run as Administrator. Type these two commands, each followed by the Enter key, then close the Command Prompt. In the example, I have used drive d: as the drive and Michael as the user name, change both of them accordingly. takeown /f d: icacls d: /grant Michael:F (you could use administrators in place of Michael).