Windows Explorer SD system folders

Question

I had an old LapTop where I had installed the AppData folder on an SD card, something that I don't advise anyone else to do because:

I finally ditched the machine and bought a new machine and installed windows conventionally. However I have a lot of data that I need to transfer to the new machine. I

But explorer won't open the SD card from the old machine. Disk manager can see it and trouble shooter says that there is no problem with it. I have made sure that the driver is up to date and the machine can read other SD cards with no problem. Please note that I have logged in as the local administrator not the group and therefore I expected to have full control. Then I tried to put it on a LAN with the new machine but I still can't get access to anything on the old machine.

I could transfer what I want to another USB or SD card on the old machine and then transfer them from the new USB to the new machine but there are a lot of files and the old machine is just too slow.

From past experience I know that it is a security issue. According to the disk manager everyone has full control on the disk (which can't be true) but the owner of the disk shows up as gobbledygook. When I try to change it, it gives me error on several files (usually temp files). So the process either won't finish or explorer still won't be able to open even the root directory. The disk doesn't even show up as a drive and disk manager doesn't seem able to assign a letter to the drive. This is must be too much security.

I returned the card to the old machine and although it still boots up without a problem the securities on the card are messed up. Again I tried to change the owner to the local administrator but yet again I get errors on some of what appear to be temporary files.

Is there anything I can do to recover my data files?

Thanks

Answer 1

For further isolation of the issue, is it that the only file/data you cannot transfer to the new machine is the folder which contains the AppData? All other files that you can put on the SD card can be transferred to the new machine with no problems? You can also try the Microsoft easy fix solution and see if it helps. Download the "Find and fix problems with devices and hardware" on this link which also contains instructions on how to properly run the fix solution.

Keep us posted.

Answer 2

Thanks for the quick response;

I am trying to access the files on the SD card.

The old machine's hard disk (small SSD) was dedicated to the system. I installed Windows so that USERS folders were on the SD card. 

The data that I want to retrieve is under my user subfolder of USERS the folder which includes my user account's AppData folder.  For example; the data includes my local email data that I have accumulated over the years.

Just to clarify, I can't even get to the root directory/folder on the SD card from the new machine. This is what I can't understand more than anything else.

When I insert the SD card into the new machine the Disk Manager recognises it and the security check on it claims that everyone has full control on the disk but I think things have gone wrong way before that. Again as I mentioned there is no letter assigned to it and can't be assigned manually at least not through Disk Manager. I haven't tried anything else in case I make things worse.

BTW, I used to back-up my data by making an image of the SD card in use on another SD card. But the story is the same with all the back-up SD cards.

I was wondering if I could get access to the files using Linux or Android and then try to sort things out. But I am not if sure that would work. Beside I would like to know what is going on.

Thanks

Answer 3

The link that I provided should fix driver issues, but it seems that the issue is with the SD card itself. It is best to contact the manufacturer for assistance and to possibly avoid data loss.

Regards.

Answer 4

No the files I need are not in AppData or its subfolders folder.

I mentioned AppData folder because when I try to change the owner of folders some of the files in these folders cause error which in my mind shouldn't anyway but that is another story.

I login as the local Administrator (1st making the inbuilt account visible: "net user administrator /active:yes". Therefore I should have full access to all the files and be able to assign permission and/or change ownership. So why do I get errors when try to apply a change ownership to all the subfolders? 

Maybe if that can be explained/fixed the rest will be fixed.

Could you please tell what this fix does? I am trying to keep this simple. This is why the 1st thing I tried to do was to attempt to change the owner on the root directory to that of the local Administrator and propagate down to all the files in all the subfolders. In future attempts I will try to do it using the command line as long as I know that these errors on the files in AppData folders are irrelevant.

It took a long time because there were loads of errors as mentioned before. Then I tried to access it in the new machine but nothing had changed. 

Thanks

Answer 5

Hi,

Just for clarification, are you trying to copy files from the old machine to the SD card or is it that the hard drive itself on the old machine has the issue? Please provide the error messages as well so that we can assess the issue better. Also what is the version of Windows installed in the old machine?

Looking forward to your response.