Folder access problems

[Simon]

Monday I got a nice blue screen telling me that the boot
volume of my HD was unmountable, oh joy!
I'd been thinking of getting myself a bigger HD for a
while and decided then was as good a time as any.
Anyway the shiny new one arrived yesterday, onto which I
did a fresh install of XP.
I put the old HD in as a secondary drive to see what files
I could salvage off it, it was a bit slow at first (HD
churning endlessly) but a run of scan disk sorted that out.
I transferred most of the stuff I want to keep off the HD,
except for the stuff within C:/Documents and Setting/Simon
which it won't let me access. After looking through the
Sharing and Security options I had an "Updating Security"
or words to that effect window pop up with a progress bar
which after it had copleted allowed me to see the contents
of the folder but when I try to access or copy anything
whithin it I still get an "Access Denied" message.
Is there a way around this, I've looked on the Knowledge
Base and tried following the instructions on taking
ownership of the folder, but there are no users available
in the list.
Any suggestions would be welcome as I'd really like to get
at the stuff in there, some of which, like the pictures
I've taken with my digi cam cannot be replaced (only took
most of them Saturday and I was going to sort through them
and burn them to CD when it happened, sod's law really)
Cheers
Simon

 

[Indigo]

That Unmountable Boot Volume error is one I have seen
quite a few times working for an unmentioned PC OEM. The
root cause of that is typically a bad load from an image.

The solution: Format and Reload the HDD.

But that bring us to your perticular problem: Recovering
data. The long and short of it is, it may not be possible
to recover that data. If the data is valuable, you might
want to get in contact with a data forensics company,
like Total Recall. When I say valuable, I mean the data
justifies the cost of the forensic recovery. These
recoveries can be pretty costly, depending on the amount
of data and how difficult the recovery is.

Pax,
Indigo