Removing all security and encryption from hard drive removed from Windows

Question

I have a hard drive enclosure that contains a hard drive which I took from my old Windows laptop. On Ubuntu, I can access all the user folders and everything else with no need for any sort of taking ownership etc. On windows, I have to enter an administrator login and wait several minutes.

Is there some way to remove these encryptions/security options from ubuntu for ease of access on Windows?

I basically want to make it into a normal hard drive but keep my old data.

Answer 1

I understand that you want to access a drive that was your primary hard drive in an older machine running windows. If you have connected it to your new machine and were able to mount it directly, then it was not encrypted at all.

Therefore, all you'll have to do is to set the NTFS permissions in order to be able to keep your files. There's an excellent ask ubuntu answer on this matter. I'm not copycatting the answer here since it is always on the network.

But there's another thing I'd like to add: if you plan on staying on ubuntu, you might consider to copy your files to a temporary place, reformat your old hard drive with ext4 and get your data back on it. There's no reason to keep using a proprietary file system after switching.

Answer 2

You cannot move an encrypted disc with Ubuntu straight up, so it have to been unencrypted when you moved it. Set the file standard to NTFS ( see Ask Ubuntu for further info ).

Always copy files before major tasks.

Apocs.