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So early in the summer I logged off the admin account on my computer and turned off the screen. I later went back to get on Facebook and instead of having both of the accounts up,(Administrator and my sisters) there was only one (My sisters). I've been trying to recover the account for some time now, and I recently found the folder with all of the documents. The thing is, because it was an administrator with a password, I cant open it because the folder is 'locked'. So now every time I click on the folder it says "C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator is not accessible. Access is denied." I've tried copying the folder, and I've tried dragging it into 'Shared Files' But it keeps saying the same thing. Any way I can get those files back?

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  • Is your sister's account an administrator account?
    – Babu
    Dec 27, 2011 at 5:39

3 Answers 3

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This is an ownership problem. The best thing to do is restore that original user account. Failing that, we can change ownership of that directory and all the subfiles and subdirectories to your sister. Just realize that that is a point of no return; once that's done, your old user account really shouldn't be used again, even if you somehow manage to restore it.

Unfortunately, I can't help you very much with specifics, because my windows 7 machine died a while ago. If I still had that machine, I would walk you through using the command net user from an elevated command line to see what's up with the user accounts on your machine. If the original account was simply disabled, you can undo that. You can also remove the password on that account. There is some stuff online about how to use net user, easily accessible via google.

If you're willing to give up on your original account (or get agita from seeing the command line :P), we can change the owner of that folder. You can do this from the properties dialog accessed from the right-click menu, but again, I can't give you specifics on where to click. You'll be looking for something to do with sharing and permissions. Change your permissions to ownership or full read-write, and you'll be able to access those files. Just remember to look for an option to give you ownership of all subdirectories and subfiles, as well.

If your sister is not an administrator, the only other thing I could have you try is using the hidden administrator account. In earlier versions of windows (Definitely XP, and I think that I recall using it in Vista and Windows 7), there was a hidden administrator account that you could only use while in safe mode. I'm unsure if I ever used it with Windows 7, but try rebooting into safe mode and logging in as administrator, then changing ownership of that directory to your sister, so that her account can read the files.

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Try opening the command prompt with administrator privilges (i.e.: open windows start, enter "cmd" into the search field, right-click on the found icon, chose "execute as Administrator", (sorry, don't know the exact wording, as I'm on a german windows)).

In the command prompt enter:

net user administrator /active:yes

or maybe

net user administrator /active

That's how you activate the default Administrator account on Win7 - hopefully this will bring it back to you in the login screen. To deactivate it again (you shouldn't really use the Administrator account for daily usage, rather create one for yourself with normal user priviliges) you would enter

net user administrator /active:no

Maybe this is how it disappeared? Maybe sis is trying some shenanigans?

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Try restoring your computer to a previous date when you are sure you had your own user account intact, using System Restore by logging in into safe mode.

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