This problem has taken up pretty much my whole weekend (long weekend here in Canada) and I'm at the end of my ropes..... Long Story Short (or maybe not so short): I upgraded my motherboard from ASUSP4PE to ABit IC7Max3 and the processor from p42.4b to p42.4c HT. I tried booting the computer after the upgrade with no luck (most likely due to different chipsets on the motherboard and cpu - upgraded from 845 to 875). I have Windows XP SP1 on my 'old' WD 60gb (parallel) hard drive which has all the family's user profiles (5). So I decided to install my new WD 120gb SATA drive and installed a new copy of Windows XP on it. I was able to boot up the computer from the new 120g HD after the fresh XP install. After this I hooked up the 60g HD as primary slave on IDE1 and it shows up as a 'D drive' in XP (after booting from new 120g drive, which is 'C drive'). The problem is although I have administrative access to the user profiles on the 60g HD and I see it in XP, I am not able to access these profiles (icons with profile names are still there in the 'D drive'). The only profile I can access is my own. Summary: I upgraded my computer's motherboard and cpu and was not able to boot from old hard drive. Installed a new hard drive and installed XP on it and was able to boot my computer. I see old hard drive as a second HD icon in XP. This second drive (old drive) has all the XP user profiles from my old computer set up but when I double click them I get 'Access Denied' message although I have adminstrator access. I NEED HELP accessing Windows XP user profiles on old hard drive. I can only boot into XP from new Hard drive and when I do the only user profile on the old I have access to is my own profile. ANY HELP APPRECIATED!

Go to your folder options and turn off simple file sharing. You need to take ownership of the files, and then change the security permissions to allow you access, even as a local administrator you wont have access to personal user profiles on a seperate hard drive. Once you have ownership of these folders, copy them back to windows documents and settings folder and then return the security settings back to what they were to begin with.