My hard drive crashed I think because everytime I try to restart it it won't it goes to a blue screen in the middle of loading xp, so luckily I have a backup hard drive and I'm trying to copy my stuff from one to another but I recently I added another account so that my family can get on the computer, they've become obssessed withthat stupid myspace site and my computer has been running slow ever since so I decided to unistall some programs and defrag afterwords it was working great then they went to myspace and it was ungodly slow so i had to restart unistalled nero and was trying to install a newer version it said it needed to restart so I let it, tried to boot up and I get a blue screen, last know good config doesn't work and neither does safe mode, and to top it off I had a program called advanced sercurity level and what it does is that it puts restrictions on user accounts so I had set up restrictions for the family account so that they couldn't see the hard drive(s) and they couldn't download anything, move anything, or make and alterations to it period.

Now I want to recover my important files, like school documents, songs, phone files, and I can't it said access is denied and I can't open the program from the existing harddrive beacuse all it sees is just that the existing hard drive account, is there anything I can do I have almost 20gb of stuff on my other harddrive I don't really want to reformat?

any help would be greatly appreciated. thank you.

Just as a first try see if anything here helps:

How to take ownership of a file or folder in Windows XP

Ok, first off thank you very much, and secondly it will only let me get the folder before I get to where my documents is, my documents is still locked it says and it says that you do not have permission to view contents but you can take control of it.

nm, it worked THANK YOU!

Ok, here's a new question bcause I thought it would be better to post in an existing topic than start another one.

what can I use to limit access to my family account so something like this doesn't happen again?

For the amount of control you want to have, the Microsoft Shared
Computer Toolkit might fit your needs if you have Home Edition.

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/s...s/default.mspx

If you have Pro, use Group Policy.

Group Policy Editor

do you have an Im name or something like that because I don't know if I should keep posting.

Post all you like. This is where I focus

alright, cool, I have a couple a questions, if that's cool
one is whether or not lots of programs in the quicklauch toolbar slow down the computer
and second question is that do any of those programs like tuneup utilities actually work to help maintain your computer?

I use Tuneup and it seems as if it was working but I don't know.

Quick Launch is just another place to put shortcuts. It would have no effect on performance. It is just like a mini-desktop or start menu if you like. I personally don't use it as I prefer to use my start menu and pin items most used to it. That just leaves more space on the Task Bar for active windows the way I work as I use these like tabs in IE.

It is important to maintain your XP. There are many ways to do it.

This is the first time that I've seen TuneUp Utilities per se.

If you already bought it it looks to be OK but most of its functions can be had for free. Then again you would have to have a few different utilities and use them all separately. A program like TuneUp makes the tasks more convenient.

XP itself will do Disk Cleanup and Disk Defrag via start > All Programs > Accessories > System Tools

I use these 2 freewares also (Ccleaner and RegSeeker):

http://www.ccleaner.com/

http://www.hoverdesk.net/freeware.htm

Also System Internals has many neat apps to explore and maintain your XP:

http://www.sysinternals.com/FileAndDiskUtilities.html

http://www.sysinternals.com/SystemIn...Utilities.html

Last but not least I use IndexDat Suite to clean .dat files:

http://support.it-mate.co.uk/?mode=P...index.datsuite

actually I just thought of something would my hard drive crashing have anything to do with me removing volumecaches out of my registry, because the disk cleanup utility was hanging on compress old files so I googled it and that's what I said to do.