A Little Windows Reinstallation Tech Assistance Needed

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!