reclaiming a user name account after reinstalling xp

[jennajamason]

hi
i had to reinstall xp because of a boot_volume error and now im up and running, alot of my files are missinglike my pictures and stuff, i had to install a new hardrive in order toavoid formating my old one. now xp is oon the new hardrive but when i go to the old hardrive and click on document settings and then my old user name it says acces denied
my question is, how do i reclaim a username from a hardrive. the whole folder has 150gb in it byut when i click on my user name it says empty but the rest of the files on thehardrive only add up to about 3 gig so it must be allin there even though it says folder empty
anyhelp would be greatly appreciated, thanks

[RabidDog]

Get some file recovery software.. make sure you are logged in as main administrator or have admin rights. I have 2 "old" windows installations and have no problems accessing any previous windows files. A good reason to keep data and system partitions/disks seperate tho.

[thevoelk]

This works best if you're logged in as the Administrator account. Right click on the original drive in My Computer (assuming D:\), and go to Properties. Click the Security tab, and give Administrator Full Control. What happened is that when you re-installed Windows XP, a different Security Identifier (SID) was generated for the main administrator account on the new Windows installation than the original. You could also attempt to Take Ownership of the files, but I believe you have to offer ownership under the old account first, so this may not work. Another thing, if this doesn't work, is to download a Linux distro called Knoppix, I believe it's made by Konqueror. It's a free bootable CD with a GUI that can read NTFS paritioned drives. You should be able to move the data from the old drive to the new drive and remove the restrictive permissions with it.

[guns1inger]

This is the microsoft knowledge base article for your specific problem

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;810881

and another of taking ownership of files and folders

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;308421

It is basically as Thevoelk has described, and should be relatively easy to resolve.

[jennajamason]

hi,
microsoft doesnt help because i see no security tab when i right click on folders. I installed a new harddrive which now has xp on it, now my old hardrive will not let me log on to my old username folder that has everything init.
What can i do because there is no security tab to follow the instuction

[Supreme2k]

Have you tried going into C:\Documents and Settings\ (your username) and copying the files from there?