Please Help Asap!!!!!

I have a dv9000. My system was acting a bit slow, so I decided to reinstall Win XP from the dedicated partition. The install went smoothly and I was using the system in less than an hour. However, 2 very strange things happened:
1. Whenever I enter my computer and click on one of my drives, be it C or D, a window opens asking me to choose the program I want to use to "open this file." Of course,this is not as serious as problem number 2, as I can click on "folder" and browse my files from there.

2. I tried to go to c:\documents and settings to retrieve the contents of the "my documents" folder from my previous windows installation. However, whenever I do ANYTHING with the folder, it says th folder "is not accessable. Access is denied." Whether I open, search, explore, etc. I get the same message. Why has this happened? What can I do to open the folder? PLEASE HELP! I really need the files there as they are related with my work. Thanks in advance.

 

That behavior I have seen it before in some of my clients computers. The reason is simple: "Virus infection". When this haapens you have the following options to deal with it:

1) Format your hard Drive and Install right from scratch.
2) Take out the HDD and connect it through USB to another computer and run an Antivirus scan on your drive.
3) Reboot your machine, go into safe mode and scan your computer with on-demand antivirus like the one you can find at www.trendmicro.com. (if you need any directions on how to use it let me know).

 

Reinstalling on top of an existing Windows installation is generally a Bad idea. You should back up your data and do a clean install (quick format the drive during the install).

As to getting to your data (problem #2): the new installation of Windows created a new user, so it won't let you access the files belonging to the "old" user. You can reset the file ownership, though I forget how at the moment. Bring up Properties on the Documents folder and...?

 

have you tried a repair install?

 

Thank you for your advice guys. I was able to resolve the first problem by entering safe mode and transferring ownership rights of the folder to my new account. I'm now thinking about reformatting the hard disk, how should I do this? Is using the "destructive reinstall" option a good idea? It can be found when pressing F11 to access the dedicated partition.

 

A clean install is always a good idea. Installing on top of an existing install, as already stated, just makes more of a mess.

Make sure you backup everything before you clean install, as all of your data will be deleted during the install.

 

Seriously, why is the first reply to every single post like this: "YOU HAVE VIRUSES!!"