Not sure if this should be in hardware or not.....
I am repairing a mates laptop, that runs Vista Home premium. Its been getting slower and slower for a few months, and hes had a few virus infections, that we have repaired, but now the OS refuses to boot. Gets past the windows loading screen, but then nothing, not even in safe mode. Best thing I thought was a complete reinstallation. He wanted his files, no probs thought me, just pull the disk, and put it in my USB caddy. This went fine, but my Win7 system refused to access the vista HDD, it saw it, but would not tell me the size, and all I got when trying to access was an 'access denied' message. It did however see the retore partition OK, and I could access this. Tried taking ownership of the drive, and giving the admin on my system full control, it did this, but still refused to let me access the OS partition. Eventually gave up, and used a linus boot disk, which got his files off OK.
I just wondered if anyone had any ideas why I could not access the OS partition, even after taking ownership etc. Is this a security feature of Vista, and if so, Ubuntu accessed the data fine.....
