Problem accessing folder

Hi there, I had a question. I have used our other laptops hard drive in another laptop to make one working laptop, anyway- I made a backup of the hard drive once It was installed on the new laptop, I was reinstalling windows and was given an option to backup the current hard drive which is now located in a "My Backup" folder on my computer. Now I am unable to access a vital folder which is named the name of the main user of the previous laptop. It is under documents and settings, and is what I am thinking the main user profile. It says access denied when I click on it and also shows that it has zero bytes of info in it when I right click it. Is there another way to access this? Or another way to access the main user profile on a hard drive where windows has been reinstalled but the info backed up? thanks for anyones help. This forum is amazing

See here:
How to take ownership of folders and files

That should get you going again.

Thanks for your help, that did it. Another save by whatthetech