My PC crashed , I had loads of photos on a secondary hard drive . When I put the hard drive on my new PC as an external the files appear as locked though I can see the individual jpeg's I cannot open them as I do not have permission . As I have several hundred photos going back years getting a professional to retrieve them is out of the question . Any suggestions ?

For decryption, the utility used to encrypt the drive and the encryption key or pass-phrase used to generate the key will be needed. Are these available?

If this is a file system permissions issue rather than an encryption issue, take ownership of the files or folders through their property dialog's advanced security interface (Windows?) using an administrative account and adjust the permissions to give your user account full or modify rights.

Hi Scleros , The drive was set as private on my PC ,it was a secondary drive D I think , and was then colored green I think when the icon appeared on "my Computer ", I was running XP . The PC itself had a major power supply failure that fried both the power supply and a large part of my mother board . I bought a new PC and removed the hard drives .When I bought and external caddy and connected it to my new PC hard drive "C " was totally wrecked and was dead , hard drive "D" still showed all my folders and individual jpeg icons within them with the file sizes of the original photos but won't allow me to open them as it says I don't have permission . I need to know if there is some software or method of changing the permissions on the drive to allow me to access the contents . As I say I have hundreds of family photos on the drive , I thought by backing them up on a separate drive (D) they would be safe if anything happened to the original drive (C) . I was only partly right as they are still there , just not available to me unless I am will to pay hundreds of £ ' s to have them professionally recovered . I now have a laptop running windows 7 , and also an iMac running OS X 10.6.7 in case recovery is dependent on a specific OS.

Many thanks for your quick response , Willie ( locutus59 )

Well we need to figure out if the issue is permissions or encryption; they are two different things.

Try this: How to take ownership of a file or a folder in Windows XP (http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;308421)

I believe it to be permissions as I never ran anything other than the basic XP programs , no third party encryption or anything like that . I was the administrator and set up my profile as Private so no body could delete or mess up the photos on the files . I had no problems accessing them until I had to move the secondary drive containing them to a caddy to be used as an external drive. When I run the external drive on my laptop it allows me to see the permissions but won't allow me to change them . When this happened a couple of years ago I even named my replacement PC with the same name as the old one and used the same logon passwords etc , but to no avail. I never needed to use any kind of password etc once I was logged onto the PC to access the files originally before my PC went boom .

So I believe it is not an encryption more a permission issue that has arisen because I swapped the drive form one PC to a new one .

Right-click the pictures' top level folder and select Properties. Click the Security tab and select the Advanced button. Click the Owner tab and select your account as owner. Select "Replace owner on subcontainers and objects" and click OK. See if you have access.

Or, follow Karma's link that I just noticed. Doh!