My Doc's lost?

Hi,

A dodgy USB port recently shorted out my computer and on reboot i get the "repair XP" screen. The repair process goes okay untill it got to a certain point in the full colour stage just after it asked for drivers for my NIC when it would say it can't read my XP disk.

After a few hours of trying different things something broke and now i can't even attempt to repair that installation so I reinstalled windows in a new directory, which I'm using at the moment. The problem is I had gigs of pictures and documents and whatnot in my My Documents folder on the other install all of which are locked in it because I set my files to private.

Now I'm hoping that there is a way to get into there so i can get those files. Anyone able to help?

 

If you have XP Pro, open any explorer window and click Tools>Folder Options, View tab, scroll down and uncheck 'Use simple file sharing'. OK out. Now right click your old My Documents folder and select Properties. On the Security tab, click Advanced. Select the owner tab, select your name in the list, check the box to Replace owner on subcontainers and objects, click Apply and OK. Back on the Properties dialog, if your name is not listed with Full Control, click Add. Type your username and click Check Names. Your computername/username should appear. Click OK. Again on the Properties dialog, select your username then check Full Control below. Click OK.

If XP Home, boot to safe mode and start with the Properties selection on the My Documents folder instructions above.

 

Thanks so much!

Now I can back up and format. My HDD is a complete mess now. In my tinkerings I managed to create 3 Windows installations.