Real Challenge

my son's computer is really in a bad state. He was getting missing HAL.DLL error message which I believe means he was having boot.ini, DLL or hard drive issues. To make matters worse, he is missing the R key off his computer so I could not enter the recovery console. I managed to install a new Windows (under Windows2) on his hard drive and get the computer to boot into this new Windows version. I did not replace the existing one because of the message that says all his My Docs files would be overwritten which leads me to the problem...

Under this new Windows2 version I cannot access any of the files that were under the original version of Windows. If I can somehow get his old files off the hard drive, I can wipe it clean and then reinstall windows for him and put back the files. I am in Admin account in the new Windows version so that is not the issue. I am not sure if it is a corrupted hard drive issue or if it is a privileges issue since the files were an admin account prior to creating the new windows version.

hopefully this makes sense. thanks in advance for any help provided.

-T.