Mounting old home directory from Windows 7 Image

Question

I used dd to create an entire image of my hard drive before I reformatted. Windows 7 was installed. I've mounted that image using OSFMount (which, by the way, works great!). The problem I'm encountering is that I can no longer access my previous home directory. (the C:\users\MyUser directory).

Is there a nice way for me to access this directory? I have the entire drive's image and remember all the passwords; so security shouldn't be a problem.

Can I, for example, make this image into a VMWare vmdk and power on the machine as if it were on real hardware still?

Answer 1

This is probably just because of the security permissions on the home directory. You'll be getting an access denied error when you try to open the directory, yes? Either that or it will offer to change the permissions, but won't be able to because the image is mounted read-only.

Instead, copy the directory to a suitable location. You'll still get a "you'll need to provide administrator permissions" dialog, but this one should work.

Alternatively, disable UAC temporarily or log in using the Administrator account (not just any administrator account, the one actually named Administrator).