Disk Access Denied

I am facing a strange trouble with my sony vaio laptop. I recently tried a restoration operation with my operating system. It worked fine for few minutes but after some time i found an error message saying disk access denied. Opeartion failed due to some invalid reason. I have no idea what could have gone wrong in my case. And my restoration went for shutdown.

Please provide some help regarding this problem.

Your help will be appreciated

If you tried to look at properties, I assume it is. I also assume the old drive is 2nd on cable and set to cable select or slave? If that is as I assume, try unplugging the new drive and set up the old one as master or(if its set as cable select) put at end of cable.

1. Right-click the folder that you want to take ownership of, and then click Properties.
2. Click the Security tab, and then click OK on the Security message (if one appears).
3. Click Advanced, and then click the Owner tab.
4. In the Name list, click your user name, or click Administrator if you are logged in as Administrator, or click the Administrators group. If you want to take ownership of the contents of the folder, select the Replace owner on subcontainers and objects check box.
5. Click OK, and then click Yes when you receive the following message:
6. You do not have permission to read the contents of directory folder name. Do you want to replace the directory permissions with permissions granting you Full Control?
7. All permissions will be replaced if you click Yes.
   
8. Note folder name is the name of the folder that you want to take ownership of.
9. Click OK, and then reapply the permissions and security settings that you want for the folder and its contents.

Click Start, click Run, type dcomcnfg, and then click OK.
Click the Default Security tab.
Under Default Access Permissions, click Edit Default.
Click Add, click Administrator, set the type of access to "Allow Access", and then click OK.
Click OK, and then click OK.
This procedure can give the administrator access again.

where you originally using Encryption before restore?
If so what was Encrypting the folders? Windows or 3rd party software?
what could have happened is you used a Encryption Program to Encrypt you folders
then when you used XP's System Restore (which restores the registry to the date selected
and then amends the files on the drive according to the registry) and the restoration point
is BEFORE you installed and run the Encryption program... so the folders themselves are
Encrypted still but the restore point doesnt have the program installed then....
you need to supply a bit more information before any help can be given properly

did you use an Encryption Program? if so what was it?
Try re-installing it and decrypting the folders.