Question : Access Recycle Bin on Boot Drive mounted as external HD on another PC

Windows XP Home on both my customer PC and my office PC.

My customer accidentally deleted some files at C: or in a folder at C: and can not remember what she deleted and now her PC will not get beyond initial POST screens at boot. The BIOS (i.e Setup) sees the HD with its Model Number and if I press F8 and select Normal Boot if DOES show me XP Home is there but reboots after that. Ditto for Last Known Good Config or Safe Mode.

I mount the PC boot HD as an external usb HD  J: on my office PC . MY PLAN IS TO go to J:\Recycler to access the other PC's Recycle Bin and select View Details and it shows the Delete date of all files and folders and then I restore (by drag and drop move) whatever my customer deleted on the date she did the deletes and we are done and her PC will boot when I put her boot HD back in her PC.

Now the structure of C:\Recycler is a object or objects S-numbers where S-numbers is like the Registry entries in HKEY USERS at the top level of the Registry. An example is S-1-5-21-789336058-776561741-839522115-1005

On her J:\Recycler there are two S-number entriies, one dated yesterday when the deletes occured so that is the one we want. And one dated today.

On my PC at my REAL C:\Recycler if I click the S-numbers object IT TAKES ME TO MY RECYCLE BIN.

Unfotunately in her J:\Recycler if I click either S-number object IT TAKES ME TO ***MY** RECYCLE BIN FOR BOTH AND I CAN NOT SEE HER RECYCLE BIN CONTENTS.

CHECKMATE !!!

My theory is that the S-number objects go to MY REGISTRY AND NOT THE REGISTRY ON THE EXTERNAL HD AND SO WE SEE MY RECYCLE BIN AND NOT HERS.

If no expert here can solve this "Gordian Knot" EE Question, I will spend 5 - 6 hours of my business time backing up her personal files from J:, doing a reformat Windows Install from MS logo Windows XP CD on her HD (remounted in her PC), installing the KEY drivers that are never there in this procedure (3 - 4 drivers), restoring her personal data from my backup, reinstalling her programs except she cannot find the Adobe Photoshop CD and IT IS REALLY A LOT MORE WORK THAN THIS DESCRIPTION SOUNDS LIKE.

ALL BECAUSE ONE or a few KEY WINDOWS FILEs are GONE and we cannot find which ones because it appears it is IMPOSSIBLE to access the Recycle Bin on a boot XP HD mounted as an external HD on another XP PC.

And yes boot.ini and all the other key XP boot files (ntldr and AutoExec.bat and IO.sys and Config.sys and 5 or 10 others) ARE ON J: at the root level and the Windows folder is there and NOTHING OBVIOUSLY IS MISSING ON J:

So I must get access to the Recycle Bin on the other PC via mounting the HD as an external HD on my office PC.

HOW DO I DO IT, EE EXPERTS ???

Regards,
  Mike

Answer : Access Recycle Bin on Boot Drive mounted as external HD on another PC

You may have to apply the TRIM to where you are loading your parameters.

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