Access denied!!?

I recently bought and installed a new 160gb hdd. i then made my old 40gb hdd a secondary hard disk. i've reinstalled windows xp on the new (master) hdd. as i've my old hdd installed as a second drive, i made a link on my new desktop to my old destop. ething is accessable, apart from 1 folder which i kept my mp3's and movies!!! there is about 5gb of stuff in that folder. anyway, etime i try to open the folder, an error message pops up: "access is denied". i can't work it out. i've looked at the file sharing options, tried dragging and dropping into another folder, but nothing can do it. not even an external program, like winamp or windows media player, can access it!!! the rest of the data on the hdd is fully accessable. somebody have any ideas? i don't actually have a security tab on the properties. no option to take ownership. any free programs on the web that i can download to access this data? i am not trying to recover deleted data.

Answer

Do you a different username on your new windows installation that you did on your old drive's windows installation? that may be the issue. you will wanna right-click on the old drive and select properties. under security, give yourself full control of the old drive, and make yourself the owner of the files under the advanced tab.