I recently experienced a complete system failure and because I mistakingly never made a windows recovery disk, I had to do a system recovery using the windows XP Home Disk. The system did not recognise the existing software and reinstalled the software which led to me losing all my software & emails etc. The most important thing I have lost is my documents. The folder is in the documents & settings folder under the old admin name but it wont let me access the content as it states that it is not accesible. The system does not let you do anything with the folder and I am desperate to get the data back. Is there anything I can download to access this locked file or is it corrupt? Another note is that I had a limited account setup up for a house mate and I can access this folder but not the admin account folder. Hope this is easy to understand and somebody can help.

Dell XP Recovery CD is destructive. First it format the HD (hence all data lost) then it cleanly reinstal the OS along with the bundled software its preinstalled factory state. You could try some recovery utilities but in my experience it is an exercise in futile. i_XpUser

Try this before anything else. http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;308421&Product=winxp http://computervitals.com/

if your a techie type, you can pull the drive out and install it on another computer or put the drive into one of those external IDE-USB boxes to access your data.

If you're trying to access it from another Windows system, that won't work. Even if it's set as "slave" or a USB drive, Windows still won't let you access files without "owning" them. per's solution is the best and usually always works form me. I've had the same thing happen after many Windows "repairs" and have needed to reset ownership of certain folders. The MS article per posted is a good step by step on how to do this. Musky If the voices inside my head paid rent, I'd be rich!