I have a bunch of my old hard drives with Windows and Linux installations on them. They are from a variety of machines, some still in existence, some not. I want to go through them, copy the files I want, to another drive, then reformat the old drives. I've been taking the drives one by one, attaching them as a second drive, and booting into a current Windows system, then going through the drives, finding the files I want, and copying them to a drive on the current system.
So far, so good, but I'm running into several accounts on the old drives in "Documents and Settings" under certain old account names and I'm being barred access to them. I'm logged into an Administator account on the current system. Should I not therefore have access to all accounts and files everywhere? What's happening here and is there a way to get access to these files? If so, how? I think I must have originally set the accounts up as "Protected" or "Hidden" on accident, but I have no idea what I did or how to change that.