Rights to save to a thumbnail drive question

[Judy Means]

When we got new computers, we wiped out our old ones and reinstalled Windows XP on them. Some we gave to a church. 

One of the people at the church uses this and does a lot of excel spread sheets.  He is trying to save one of his creations to a thumbnail drive...and is getting the message that he does not have rights to save to this drive.  Check with the administrator. 

When we wiped these drives we only reinstalled WinXP and when he signs on, there is only a User button to click on..there is no administrator account at all. 

How would one correct this so he can backup something to one of the USB drives to his thumbnail...? 


Judy

[Bloody Jack Kidd]

XP Home or XP Pro?

With home - users are usually Admin level accts, with Pro, could be a lesser privileged acct.  That said, they should be able to access the system as Administrator, unless that acct was renamed / disabled.

[Judy Means]

Rick,

Thanks for the suggestion.  It is XP Pro.  I'll check into and admin account.  I asked if one was there on the signon page, but none was listed. 


Judy

[Lance Bateman]

First, it sounds like you possibly did not do a full data-wipe on the computers before giving them - that's a privacy concern.  Just "deleting" the files (such as My Documents, etc.) doesn't do it - you need to rewrite over them with something.

Second - if there is no admin account, they may need to reinstall the OS, to create the admin account.

[Bloody Jack Kidd]

something like Killdisk is good to use for systems that are to be sold / donated / etc.

http://www.killdisk.com/

[Jeff Zylstra]

The administrator account in XP Pro is only available when you log on in to "safe mode", by pressing the F8 key before the Windows logo appears.  After you do this, you may go into Control Panel - User Accounts and add an "Admin" account that has administrator privileges. 

Also, has anything changed on the thumb drive?  If somehow the permissions got screwed up on the thumb drive, or his anti-virus or anti-malware is set to control access of USB drives, that could be an issue as well.

[Gene Foraker]

something like Killdisk is good to use for systems that are to be sold / donated / etc.

http://www.killdisk.com/

CCleaner has a new version out (free) which includes scrubbing parts of a disc.   You should be able to keep the OS installation and wipe everything else.

[Judy Means]

I thought I'd come back and report what the problem was.  First, it was not the computer, but the thumbnail drive.  The computer was wiped, and did have an Administrator, just not named that. 

Seems there are some USB thumbnails that now come with software called U3...or something like that.  This software does not play well with windows at times, it appears. We did check the drive and it had this software on it.  Rather than try to talk the person through reformatting that drive, it was suggested to just get a new thumbnail. without that software program on it.  Thumbnails with that software on it are labeled as such.   

I'd not heard of that, and fortunately my Tech guy dropped by yesterday, so I quizzed him when my suggestions were not working.  He was the one that found the problem and offered solutions.  That was the problem.  It was not allowing the XP to write to the thumbnail.

Live and learn. 

Judy