Photo: Vanishing hard drive.


While repartitioning my home Windows XP box's hard drive -- something I'vce done at least half a dozen times before --  I have rendered my old "My Documents" folder inaccessible to me. If you've seen this before and have a suggestion, I'd appreciate it!

Here's what happened:
  • I used to have two partitions created using PartitionMagic  on my 160GB drive: 120 for Windows XP, 40 for Mandrake Linux.

  • I was running out of space on the Windows side, and since I do most things Unix-y on my Mac, I decided to reclaim the 40GB that Mandrake was using. I used PartitionMagic and set it up to delete the Mandrake partition and then append it to the Windows partition.

  • No, I didn't make a backup. Bad move on my part. I was tired.

  • PartitionMagic did its thing, reclaiming the partition. It then rebooted the system, and on rebooting, the monitor displayed "L 99 99 99 99 99 99..." in text mode and the computer stopped. Just a little MBR (Master Boot Record) problem; nothing I haven't seen before and easy to fix.

  • With the MBR fixed, I was able to boot into Windows. The problem: PartitionMagic left a program that runs on boot-up that restarts the machine. Which boots into Windows, which then hits this program, which reboots the machine. Which boots into Windows, which then hits this program...

    I can't find where PartitionMagic put this program.

  • I try a little trick that's worked for me before. I reinstall Windows XP without erasing the partition first. I get the standard warning and reinstall Windows into a new directory, C:\WINXP (the original is in C:\WINDOWS). The main user of the old system was "Administrator"; the main user of the new system is "Joey deVilla".

  • I now boot into Windows. Under C:\Documents and Settings, I see the old "Administrator" folder, the "My Documents" folder for my old system and where all my files are stored. I try to open it, I get this:

    ACCESS DENIED

    Windows reports that this folder's file size is 0.
Looking at the hard drive capacity, I see that all my old files are still on it -- about 118GB of my hard drive is already taken up with files. I just can't get to them.

(I've done this before and have always been able to get back to my old "My Documents" folder. Damned if I can figure out why this time is different.)

Most of what's in this is eaither backed up of easily replaceable. What I really want are the past few months' photos, which I can never replace, although having my MP3 collection would be a bonus.

Anyone know how I can get to these files? Let me know either via email or in the comments!