"Access is denied" when retrieving files on a different computer

I backed up my files on a WD My Book Essential and then a week after the backup, my computer died and refuses to be revived.  I “retrieved” the files from the My Book onto my new laptop, to a “Retrieved Contents” folder, but many of the files now will not open, claiming that “Access is denied” or that I don’t have the necessary permissions to open them.  The files I cannot open list “System,” “Administrator,” and a long string of digits as the entities who can access these documents.  Even though I am the administrator, I cannot access the files unless I change the permissions and ownership of each file singly.  I changed the permissions and ownership of the whole folder, but that did not help me access my files.  The old laptop was running Windows XP and the new one has Windows 7.  Both computers have SmartWare 2.0.0.  How can I gain access to my files?  Thank you for your help!

Hello, see if the steps from the link below are useful. 

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/308421/en-us

Sounds like you didn’t didn’t take ownership of the folder and  select the Replace owner on subcontainers and objects. This should work. Follow the like Ichigo gave you for complete instructions.

However I would be careful on what files you use this on. If they are just your data files you should be ok. Some files don’t operate properly if the ownership is changed.

I am have the same type of problem. I am comparing files on my MY Book against another harddrive and getting the Access denied problem. What I need is a utility that take ownership of all files that I don’t currently have access to and set the security to give me or administrators control to grant access and then restore the previous ownership which may not be a valid user on this machine but on another computer I use.

Right now the only way I can think to do my comparison is to copy the partitions I want to empty drive or space then change the ownership of all files on these partitions and do the comparison. Then I can discard the copies after I am done. This seems like a whole lot of hassle just to get read access to every file. to verify them. Not to mention the need for a lot of spare storage space.

Any ideas on how to get read access without permanently changing the ownership of the files?

Thanks

Or it could be that the hardware itself doesn’t do what you’d like it to do in the first place because it’s poorly designed and to get it to do anything other than act as a dumb hard disk is pretty much impossible. To get it to do the same task twice is completely impossible.

The learning centre is about as useful as a chocolate teapot as well since it won’t ever tell you what to do to fix your specific problem (in my case, getting it to act as something other than a dumb stand alone hard disk). I have the My Book Live 3TB version by the way so this is probably a similar problem that occurs over all their hardware.