PCTech Forums

I'm trying to work on my friend's PC. It's a Dell w/Xp home. It's just really screwed up, spyware, some virii, won't even boot to his profile. Instead of screwing around with removing all the crap, I plugged his HDD into my PC as a slave and copied all his music, pictures, etc to one of my backup drives (after running spybot, adaware, norton on his drive).

The problem is this: there is a folder on his dektop under his profile that I can't copy. He has a password on his profile - which I know - but it doesn't prompt me to enter it or anything, it just says that access is denied. Is there any way that I can gain access to this folder while his HDD is inside my machine? can I delete a password list in his windows directory or anything? I tried to create the same named profile with the same password in MY XP, but i still couldn't get into that folder.

The only thing I 've thought of that I haven't tried yet is to go into safe mode on his PC (i can't get into any of the profiles - the wallpaper comes up, but nothing else) and remove the password from his profile, then try it again back in my PC... does anyone know if this will work?

well, I want to thank you very kindly for your advice... I didn't try it, but it sounds like you know what you're talking about... thank you.

what i did was: i put his HDD back in his machine... booted to his profile as muich as possible. I had to "end process" on explorer.exe - there is something seriously wrong with it. I open task manager, chose "new task", in the run box i clicked "browse"... in that mini-explorer window, i got to his desktop and it allowed me to make a copy of the folder to c:\ directory. I put his HDD back in my PC and i copied it over fine.

I'm gonna clean Xp install his PC, it's pretty bad... it's got the 69.20.16.183 spyware (whoever makes that - may god strike him down). I tried to delete all the profiles and create a new one on his PC, everything seemed to be semi-ok, but that malware is still lurking about, copying itself around, changing search pages, etc. I tried a few tutorials to remove it, but - like CoolWebSearch before it, nothing works. screw it, new OS time!