Recently I had to rescue a data from NTFS partition for somebody. It was a totally messed up laptop that could not boot the OS. It comes with a hidden partition from which you can restore the system and in theory to preserve the existing user data.

I did not want to take any risks though. Instead I removed the disk and put it in a USB 3.0 enclosure and connected it to my laptop in hope I can copy the data. Although I was able to see the folder structure and open some folders there were many I could not access. I was getting pop-up saying “You don’t currently have permission to access this folder.”

Luckily I was able to find a solution on Clint Boessen’s Blog.

There are 3 settings in the Local Security Policy related to the problem:

User Account Control: Admin Approval Mode for the Built-in Administrator account - Disabled
User Account Control: Behaviour of the elevation prompt for administrators in Admin Approval Mode - Elevate without prompting
User Account Control: Run all administrators in Admin Approval Mode - Disabled

The correct settings are in bold.

In my case the first two had the correct settings already but I had to change the last one which solved the problem – I was able to copy the data to a backup location.