File Permissions?

[ffutures]

When I replaced my Windows box earlier this year I kept the hard drive from the old Windows 10 computer on the assumption that I might at some stage need to access some file or use some software that isn't on the new machine. Documents should have been OK because I did copy everything across. But yesterday this actually came up - I needed a document that I couldn't find, put the drive into an external holder, then discovered that I couldn't get into the documents on the hard drive because it's looking for permissions which are long gone. I'm guessing that if I booted from that drive on a suitable machine I'd be able to read it, but that's not likely to happen.

Fortunately I did eventually find the file on my current PC, I'd been looking in the wrong directory with a slightly wrong file name, but I'm now wondering if there is some way to fix this if it happens again and I really do need to open documents. Any suggestions?

Comments

[turol]

Use a Linux live USB stick. It doesn't care about permissions. It should work as long as the filesystem is not encrypted and you're not trying to write files.

[ffutures]

No, no encryption. If Linux can do that I suspect that my Macbook Pro can too, I just didn't think of it. I'll give that a try, if it doesn't work I'll try Linux.

[turol]

I don't use Mac so I wouldn't know. The NTFS-3G software at least seems to be available for Mac Os, not sure about supported versions.