takeown cmd to recover harddrive files?

My cousin's laptop recently went to crap. The windows system startup folder got corrupted. Anyway, I pulled the harddrive and plugged it into my desktop to pull off her personal files (System restore/repair with CD did Not work)
Anyway, I got it to show up fine on my machine, but every single folder, subfolder, and file requires me to go through the arduous process of about 7-10 clicks to 'acquire the security permissions'
Since there are a good 4-600 photos alone, and numerous folders and subfolders, this obviously is not a very efficient method.
After poking around some, it seems like running the takeown commands through the disk would solve this issue...am I correct in assuming that or do I need to run down a different avenue?

Thanks!

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc753024(WS.10).aspx

See /r switch

recursive through sub folders and all included files.

Or get everything onto an external USB this way

Use Ubuntu Live CD to Backup Files from Your Dead Windows Computer - How-To Geek

Awesome, thanks!

You're welcome. Please post back if it actually works so others in the same boat will know.

In addition to the takeown procedure it is advisable to actually give the owner's username specific full control file permissions on the files as this prevents any potential issues should the ownership change for any reason in the future.

this is particularly useful in multi-user systems where I tend to set ownership as the administrator group and apply the correct individual permissions for the users

Yes, ideally I want to be able to move all of her photos/school files/etc. back to her harddrive after we re-install, so I want to make sure that she can use her own data after I have returned it.

The takeown and file permissions should always be performed on the final destination pc unless the ownership/permissions are given to a standard user or group. the user fred on two machines is seen as two different users by the NTFS file system, which uses unique Security Identifiers [SID] rather than human readable names. This is also true of the username on subsequent installs on the same system, [hence the access issue you had in the first place

the Admiistrator user / group, everyone, and system Etc. SIDs are constant across installs which means setting ownership can work across installs - but is ironically a weakness in security should a malicious user gain access

That is good to know, I will make sure to set it as admin user instead of my personal username, thanks!
I'm not too worried about security in this particular instance, but thank you for the info!