OMG I need help BAD

Recently had to reformat Wife's pc. So I grabed all her "important" stuff- about 1.5GB, and copied it to my other pc that has a 400GB hard drive that's almost empty. After about 3 hours (wireless) the transfer was complete and I reformatted her hard drive and reinstalled the OS.

But now I can't access the files on that other pc, or ANY files at all on that drive. The hard drive says "352GB free of 372GB", showing there's 20 GB of files on the drive. Yet the 4 folders it shows on the drive show empty. About the only thing I can do is make a folder. But I can't paste any files not only in any folder, but also in the root directory of the hard drive.

After scouring the internet I found a tutorial that says to "change it's 8.3 file name". But when I try, I get the same error. "Could not find this item. This is no longer located in <path>. Verify the item's location and try again."

I'm so in the doghouse if I can't recover these files for her. H-E-L-P!

Is the folder set to show hidden files and folders? If not you won't see 'em. Go to Organize ---> Folder And Search Options ---> View ---> mark 'show hidden folders, files and drives'.

Do you have permission to access (read/copy and write) data to that drive? Give yourself full access and try again.

I hope this helps, mate. I lost my wife's files once too... made Stalin seem like a picnic...

Also, 3 hrs to transfer 1.5Gb seems a bit much. Is it possible there may have some glitch and the files are corrupted?

Yes, folder permissions are fine. I call that other pc my "server" b/c it has all my files on it. If I didn't have folder sharing and persmissions setup it wouldn't let me paste any files over my LAN to it. This is something I've never seen before. And if you wanted to save a few files, what's wrong with copy and pasting? Until now I've never had an issue. I have over 4TB of files and all of them were saved to my server from my main pc.

Get an Ubuntu live cd, boot, recover onto USB.

Something which could be worth trying:

Use the file manager on a linux live CD.
I recommend Ubuntu because it's very easy for Windows users who have never used Linux before. Also its most recent version will almost certainly have the right drivers for all your hardware.

You can download the latest Ubuntu istaller from here:
Download Ubuntu | Ubuntu

It;s an iso which you burn to CD, which will be bootable.
Although it's the Ubuntu installer, there's no need to install it to your hard disk, you can just boot it to use the Ubuntu OS direct from the CD. It has a good file manager on its menu, very similar to Windows Explorer.

Ubuntu disobeys all Windows protections about ownership. I have used it to copy files from User folders which I could not access in Windows.

Edit added:
after posting that I notice Frostmourne has also suggested it :)

Thanks guys, you have no idea how much I preshadit. Weird thing is, I can RIGHT CLICK>NEW>Folder all day, but if I try to paste anything into that new folder I get an "Item Not Found" dialog box which further states: "Could not find this item. This is no longer located in <path>. Verify the item's location and try again". I get this error even if I try to paste anything on the root drive. Will try Linux boot disk when i get home from work. Thanks again