Any help appreciated (Dual boot issue)

J

John Mulhausen

Okay, it's not exactly a "dual boot" system, but that
sort of frames what the deal is.

Some time ago, I got Windows XP Pro, and it ran for a
while just fine. Now, I had set my "Documents and
Settings" to be private. I have ftp access to the
machine, and who knows, in my mind I thought it was at
the very least a neat feature. Now I wish I had never
done it.

I had installed XP on hard drive #2, hard drive number 1
contained an old, failing Windows 2000 install. Now, I
noticed in the hard drive root for both the old Win2k
drive and the WinXP drive, there was the set of standard
sys files. NTLDR, Autoexec, Pagefile, etc. I
thought "well, I'm never going to use the broken Win2k
install, so I'll delete all those files." Fantastic idea,
I'm sure, except what it managed to get me was a
nice "NTLDR Missing" error on next bootup.

I tried copying the ntldr from the WinXP drive over to
the Win2k drive, no dice. I was screwed, I figured, but
I'd have a better shot getting things running if I just
formatted the now-COMPLETELY-screwed Win2k drive, leave
the old XP install where it was, and install a full WinXP
on the freshly-formatted drive (right on C: where god
intended) and just copy everything from the short-lived
OLD XP install, afterwards.

Worked fine except for one horrible thing. My "Documents
and Settings" folder on the old Install was still set
to "private". I logged in as Admin on the new XP install,
no access was given. I tried repairing the old XP install
with system recovery console - nothing would get it to
boot. So, I went full on install, choosing the "repair"
option on the old winXP drive before beginning the 30
minute long setup process. It got through all the file
copying, and then the first restart came. As soon as the
GUI saying "Setup is restarting.............." came up,
it restarted again. Then showed the same screen. Then
restarted again. Then again. Then again.

I've tried EVERYTHING to get into the old Win XP install,
but even Safe Mode With Command Prompt for Win XP loads
some kind of GUI and that just causes it to spontaneously
restart, BIOS-on. Worse, because I used a personal login
instead of using the "Administrator" login, system
recovery console won't let me log in to my account to get
to the private files either, as it simply asks: "Enter an
Administrator password."

Can ANYONE help? I'm at wit's end. It would seem to me
that since I know the username and password for this
account that somehow, somewhere, I ought to be able to
access it. But from the working Windows XP - it's
impossible, it only knows it's own log ins. And any
inroads directly booting the old install end up either in
a restart loop, or logged in as "Administrator" in sys
recovery console with no access at all.

My email address is the best way to reach me.

-John
 
R

Roger Abell

Logged in as an admin is the working install, take
ownership of the inaccessible folders in the old
install. You do this is the Owner tab within the
Advanced view in the Security dialog of the folder's
properties. In Pro you do this in an F8 safe mode
boot or in a regular boot if you have shut off Simple
sharing at the bottom of the View tab in Folder Options.
 
J

John Mulhausen

AWESOME. That absolutely worked. I didn't even think to
try turning off simple file sharing. No such hijacking
seemed available with the security options I had. Thank
you so much.

-john
 

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