Last year I installed XP to replace Vista on my laptop and before I did it I copied an image onto a spare USB hard drive for completeness. There are a bunch of files i need on there and no matter what i do it keeps asking for admin password when i want to access the user account area. I didn’t set us admin accounts on the laptop in question.

EDIT
Just navigated to it and it let
Any idea how to get in there easily?

[Edited on 5/8/09 by liam.mccaffrey]

I think this might be possible by making "Administrator" on your current PC the owner?

If so, right click the folder in question, then select Properties > Security > Advanced > Owner and make the account you use the owner of the files.

This may take a while, as it'll set you as the owner for each file in the directory, but it should fix the problem.

Regards,
Simon

Is the USB Drive is NTFS then you should be able to convert it to FAT32 and therefore forget the access rights.

If it is a copmelte PC/Laptop then there are various Linux Live CD's that allow you to reset the Admin Password.

Live Linux CDs are great for rescuing stuff on Windows drives.

Download Puppy Linux ISO which is tiny and ideal for the purpose make a Puppy boot CD from the ISO, then boot from CD and you will be able to do whateever you want with the windows files.

http://www.puppylinux.com/

[Edited on 5/8/09 by britishtrident]