My Music and My Pictures suddenly inaccessible

[comradec]

I did a clean install of Windows 7 Home Premium 32-bit edition the other day, whilst also leaving Windows XP on my computer as part of a dual-booting system.

As I'd done previously when running a dual-boot with Windows Vista, I made sure that the five data folders - Documents, Music, Pictures, Videos and Downloads - were located in the same place on both systems. That is, on a second hard drive at D:\Steve\Documents, D:\Steve\My Music, D:\Steve\My Pictures and so on.

Both the XP and 7 partitions are on the same hard drive, but they are hidden from each other - something I set up using Acronis Disk Director Suite 10. I'm using the boot manager automatically configured by Windows 7 to choose between XP and 7 at boot-up.

And everything seemed to be working fine ... for a short while anyway.

Working in my XP system today, however, I find that I can no longer access two of those five folders - D:\Steve\My Music and D:\Steve\My Pictures.

If I try to look in either of these two folder a box pops up to tell me that "D:\Steve\My Music is not accessible. Access is denied."

I haven't changed any of the software in my XP system. The total amount of data on the D-drive doesn't appear to have changed, so I assume that the Music and Pictures are still there.

Rebooting into Windows 7, though, I find that the boot-up doesn't progress beyond the "Windows 7 is starting" point.

Can anyone suggest what might be happening here and how I might regain access to the Music and Pictures folders within XP and also get back into Windows 7?