access to unshared user files

[mellowyelloe]

I just got a virus last night that would not let me log on. I had three users on my computer. Two were my roommate's, which didn't have their files marked as unshared. Mine however, I did not want to share. I got a new hard drive and loaded windows XP home edition sp2. It works fine, the virus didn't transfer over to the other hard drive. I got the shared files to transfer perfectly. But, I can not access my files because I am not logged on, on the old hard drive. I am just wondering if anyone knows some way that I can access my files so I can burn them to dvds, due to the fact I did not think about getting a new hard drive that has enough space to put all my files on. I just want to get some of the files on disc's so I can format my old hard drive, and make sure the virus is totally gone. Any help will be appreciated.

Thank You,
Richard

We must all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately.
-Benjamin Franklin

[OlyComputers]

It's a matter of permissions. If you right click on teh files you want to transfer from your current windows installation you can go to the security tab and change ownership to yourself. This will give you full rights to do as you please to the files (I believe you have to do this from safemode in XP home)

You could also boot from your old drive, make the files available, or move them to a folder in an unsecured directory for transfer. I know that you were having trouble logging in but you might be able to get in using safemode or the administrator account.

There's also the third option, of using a Live CD linux distrobution (some bootable partition managers will do what you need too) and copying the files over from there. Most of these distrobutions don't care much about windows file ownership.