How do I access a different Windows XP in the same partition?

Question

my windows xp was a complete disaster (an unfixable login loop, blazefind solution did not work), so i decided to reinstall it, but i didnt want all my stuff to vanish, some of it is valuable! so what i did is install XP in a different folder (i named it WINDOWS2). When i try to access a folder that was in the other windows xp, it says 'access denied'. is there a way around this? is there a way to still save all my stuff?

oh yah, when i try to log into the old broken windows xp, now it just trys to reinstall it! so now i have a working XP and one that wants to be installed... i know my stuff still exists somewhere on my hard drive because when i look at my C drive, there is still a whole lot of stuff taking up the space.

what do you guys recomend? am i pretty much screwed?

Answer 1

If you've got windows 2000, you could try running it alongside XP, seeing as you'd still be able to access all the files, and then make a backup of everything and format the hdd and start again

Or you could get another hdd, put XP on that, and make it the primary hard drive and access your files through there

When I install windows over a previous version of the same version, eg 98se over 98se or xp sp2 over xp sp2, all the files are still there from the previous installation, and everything works fine, so for example, before, XP firewall was screwed up and couldnt send any data in/out of the computer through the internet and wouldnt load the firewall explorer window so I reinstalled windows over the original and everything works fine and better than it did before and that version is what im using now :P

Anyway, thats about all the help I can give ):