Data is linked with 2 primary hard drives while recovering data off one.

[Monkey Ninja]

Hey,

My friends laptop died, so I was asked to recover the data from the primary hard drive with the operating system installed on. I managed to gain access through setting permissions on my computer. When recovering the data I noticed data from my hard drive is visible on my friends hard drive. On my friends hard drive I can access my user profile through documents and settings and other information like program files at different location. When I tried to delete some data as a test, data from my hard drive would also be deleted. I noticed that some information is stored on friends hard drive but not sure if its direct shortcut to location on mine or if data has been transferred over. To me it looks like the data is linked between the 2 hard drives with other information stored. I might have to reformat the hard drive but I'm afraid my data would be deleted as well.

There are a few questions I have. Is there anyway to correct this ? Was there something I did through setting permission that caused this issue that I am unaware of, How would I reverse this ? If I just gave the HDD back, would any data from mine be left stored on it ?

Thanks, any help will be appreciated.

 

[drtweak]

Once you remove the hard drive from the system you won't see each others data. I have see this before. The folders are trying to connect via registry settings. The folders on his PC know they are Documents Music Videos etc, they then look up in the registry where they should point too and then point to your files.