Using a Windows 7 machine, I'm attempting to recover files from a mounted disc image of a Windows XP machine, made with Macrium Reflect, and the files, under user Admin, are password protected.

Attempt to read these files is denied. The current owner is shown as Administrators on the W7 machine ("BETA").



Attempting to change owner to me fails as expected due to write protection


Any solutions?

I presume this is a common situation with Reflect users. I'm hoping there's one a little more direct than e.g. setting up a VM to provide a partition to receive a writable restore.

Thanks.

When you mounted the media, 2-options are offered in the MOUNT selection window...

Enable access to restricted folders
&
Make writable

You should probably select both of those (just a guess)...

Yes, try those two options that Froggie suggested first.  That's what I would do next.  Don't worry about the Make writable option altering your image sets.  The writes made are transient.  When the image set is unmounted, changes are disregarded.

Froggie. Whoops. I missed those. Thanks. Just the first proved sufficient:



dbminter, Thanks too.

I was going to ask what “password protected” meant. Based on the screenshots it seems like you were just running into a permissions issue. In that case, “Enable access to restricted folders” ignores all NTFS permissions, so you don’t have to waste time adjusting them. It’s helpful in precisely this sort of situation.

I was going to ask what “password protected” meant.

Good question

I recall that this user account was password protected and I had assumed the files were too, but that assumption may have been unjustified. And this success seems to show it was false.

Thanks.

I don't think it's possible to password protect files on an individual basis.  There's a password on the User account to keep people out of it, but unless the partition is encrypted by Bitlocker or some other form of volume protection, the files won't be password protected.  And Bitlocker and other "drive" encryption schemes don't work on a file level, I believe.  I think they scramble the partition access itself.  Not sure how it works.  Don't know about Bitlocker, but other applications basically copy everything to a container and encrypt access to mounting the container file as a drive.

^ Windows has an encryption capability called EFS that can encrypt files such that user credentials or a certificate are required to decrypt them. But it’s an old technology that’s more trouble than it’s worth in the modern era.