Recover my documents from a crashed vista OS hard disk

My Vista Operating System Hard Disk Just crashed. It was running Vista Home Premium. My Computer is an HP 8170in media centre PC.

I have managed to salvage most data off it from the other partitions as well as the C:\ except the my documents which has all my user files on them. I have already tried using an XP computer to get into the hard disk but it doesnt allow me to change the securities from there. Have tried changing security ownership by using articles from the forum by goin on the security tab in XP but its not allowing me to change this for the documents and settings. Is it located elsewhere by any chance? Am i changing the wrong folder? At the minute it just shows the folder grayed out with no access to it... you do not have permission message and its disk size shown is 0mb. Assuming this is becuase of a security issue.

I also bought a new hard disk and used the hp restore disks to re add windows vista on that hard disk. Now on that system i cannot access my old hard disk and i get a blue screen. If i attempt to only boot from my old hard disk i get a 0x0000007b (0x78d2524 oxc0000034 ox00000000 0x00000000) error

Please help. Me desperate now.

Documents & Settings is not a folder but a junction point pointing to the users folder.
It is the same for the My documents icon.
So from the other PC, your documents are somewhere else if you moved the location or in c:\users\yourusername\
There once you discovered the path of your files/folders, you can take ownership and transfer your files.
Next time as soon as you have installed your OS, move the location of your "Documents" folder in another partition.

Thanks Sid. Unfortunately it is not showing my user name under C:\users\erroljr which is what my path should have looked like. The only folders under users are "default", "hp pavilion", "public" and a greyed out "iusr_nmpr". The HP Pavilion which im assuming is my real location, as my msn contacts and my windows emails are located here under teh local folder, has following folders only - "AppDAta", Bluetooth software, links, NTI shadow, saved games, searches, videos, NTuser.dat.log1, NTuser.dat.log2

iusr_nmpr, this user has something to do with the windows media player:

"""Media Player. According to this technote, wmpnscfg.exe is used to alert users when a new media device is found on the network. Wmpnscfg is also responsible for starting the Windows Media Player Network Sharing Service (NSS) and then waits for notifications from the service. When wmpnscfg is notified that a new media device is available on the network, it displays a popup in the system tray that informs the user about the availability of the new device. If the user clicks the popup, wmpnscfg launches Windows Media Player, which displays a dialog box that asks the user to either allow or deny sharing with the new device. Whether or not you need to run this program on startup must be decided by you. If you feel that you want this program starting automatically so that you have it available as needed, then do not disable it. This program is not required to start automatically as you can start it manually if you need it. It is advised that you disable this program so that it does not take up necessary resources. Many users have reported this process slows their boot time."""

So very weird that there is no documents account in the hp pavillon account ?

Did you install over the top of the previous crashed version? Try running error checking on the drive. I usually move the documents folder to another partition to protect it.

Am not too sure what i did...initially had done a system restore which stopped working. Maybe that was the cause for the hard disk crash. Now im using pc inspector to see if i can find thh files someplace. Lets see if this thing works. Thanks both of you for the help. Shall keep you guys updated