2nd hard drive question

[scottws]

Since I have 4GB of RAM and XP only sees 3GB, I have decided to move to Vista Business 64-bit. On my current computer, I have a 80GB primary drive which XP and my applications are installed on. I also have a 500GB secondary drive that possesses the contents of my My Documents folders and the Shared Documents folders as well as some other folders for other data.

My plan is to simply delete the partition on the 80GB primary drive and install Vista on it from scratch. That part I am comfortable with. But I had some questions about the secondary drive. I understand that under Vista I would not, by default, be allowed access to my former My Documents folders until I would take ownership of those folders with my new user, but what about all the other folders that were manually created on that drive?

Currently, Administrators, CREATOR OWNER, Everyone, SYSTEM, and Users have permissions to the E:\ partition by default and those permissions are inherited everwhere except the folders that represent Shared Documents and My Documents.

Don't the SIN numbers of the groups change each OS installation? I imagine Vista wouldn't see those groups as the same thing that they were under my XP installation.

I can fix all that if it's just a minor permissions issue, but I'm just concerned that after I do this that my data would be irrecoverable. Please abate my fears. Thanks.

 

[Nothinman]

I understand that under Vista I would not, by default, be allowed access to my former My Documents folders until I would take ownership of those folders with my new user, but what about all the other folders that were manually created on that drive?

That's not something new with Vista, every version of NT has been that way as long as NTFS was used since every file has permissions attached to it. People are only noticing it now because XP was the first NT release aimed at regular users and Vista is the first upgrade from that. And yes, it will likely affect all of the files on that volume.

Don't the SIN numbers of the groups change each OS installation? I imagine Vista wouldn't see those groups as the same thing that they were under my XP installation.

I've heard that they change but I've never verified that they're different between installations. It wouldn't surprise me if the base groups (i.e. Administrators, Users, Everyone, etc) used the same SID but there's virtually no chance that your account will get the same one.

I can fix all that if it's just a minor permissions issue, but I'm just concerned that after I do this that my data would be irrecoverable. Please abate my fears. Thanks.

You only have to worry if you've encrypted anything.

 

[scottws]

As I suspected. And yes I have already decrypted everything that was encrypted. Thanks for your answers.

BTW, I do have a backup of my EFS key from XP. Will it work in Vista? This is more curiosity than anything else. I thought about creating some text file and encrypting it and then importing the EFS key in Vista and trying it to see if it would work.

 

[RebateMonger]

To avoid a possible boot drive letter issue, just to be safe, I'd disconnect that second drive during the OS install. I don't know how Vista handles pre-existing drives but, with XP, it's always seemed safest to disconnect anything that XP might think is a hard drive.

 

[scottws]

Already did the install of Vista and I didn't have to mess around with the drive too much other than pretty much completely redo all the permissions.