I've broke my windows!

[Don't Tell Him Pike]

Hi everyone, I'd appreciate any help you can give me with the following.
I've recently put Windows XP Home on my PC, and all was reasonably well. Did a bit of tinkering, but my e-mail stopped working. Tried a few bits and bobs with those restore points (or whatever they're called).
Anyway, decided, to reformat and reinstall, as there was only windows on the disk. I'd put the my documents folder on a second hard drive in the pc, theory being that if windows failed, I could reformat etc and all would be well.
Now for my mistake. I'd made the my documents folder "Private", on the original installation of XP, and the new installation of windows won't let me in (I'd give the computer the same name, and all my personal info during installation was the same as the original installation. That's why I (naively)didn't expect a problem). Keeps saying access denied. Have tried booting into safe mode and logging in as an administrator, but i've still not managed to find a way of un-privatising the folder. I'm sure there must be a way.

Thanks in advance to anyone who can help me out of this without losing all my digital piccys. And yes, I have properly realised the advantage of backing up to removably media.

Cheers

DTHP

[Memetic]

If what you have done is encrypt the folder then there is hope, but it might be expensive hope, take a look at this:

http://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/windows/xp/all/proddocs/en-us/encrypt_to_recover_agent.mspx

Goods luck.

[TR4A]

See:

How to take ownership of a file or folder in Windows XP

http://support.microsoft.com/?id=308421

If that does not work you might try booting up in Safe Mode and try to access them.

[BOAC]

Can you copy via DOS?

[Don't Tell Him Pike]

Thank you to all who read my post, and bigger thanks to Memetic, TR4A and BOAC.
Tried TR4A's option first, it worked a treat, two minute job.
Many thanks once again, especially to TR4A!

Cheers

DTHP:D :D

[Naples Air Center, Inc.]

Don't Tell Him Pike,

With WinXP, should the install ever fail, you can always do Repair with the WinXP CD. If that does not fix the problem, you can always do an install of WinXP on top of itself. That should solve your problems and as long as you tell WinXP to keep the current File System intact, you will not lose any data short of what you had in the Windows Directory.

So you can do an install on the WinXP Hard Drive and not have to worry about having your data on the same Drive.

Take Care,

Richard

[TR4A]

Don't Tell Him Pike

Your're welcome. I ran upon this a few days ago. I was trying to figure out how to access My Documents from another computer on my network. That's when I found out XP Home won't let you and you have to put the files in some other folder such as Shared Documents. XP Pro will let you.