access denied after re-installation

Hello group,

I´ve switched a few times between XP and Vista, meaning re-installing the
whole system a few times
I´ve got 2 harddisks, a primary for the system and a secondary for data
For a re-installation, I simply format the primary drive and install the OS
as usual

Now I´m having problems with file access from the secondary drive under
Vista
If the secondary disk was formatted under XP, any data stored on it is
protected beyond admin rights, meaning I can´t even edit a .txt file, not
even when logged on as administrator
I can open the file and read it, but if I edit it and try to save the
changes, it says access denied
Sometimes (not sure if always) it won´t let me edit newly created files
either, meaning the creator of the file has no write access to the file, if
the drive was not installed under Vista
Games and applications installed on the secondary drive work fine, but if
they try to save settings or highscores or something in their own folder,
even though the process is owned by the system itself are denied access as
well
I´m also using VirtualPC, where I store the virtual HDD in a file on the
secondary drive, and again, after switching from XP to Vista, I can install
VirtualPC, I can open existing virtualPC´s including their virtual HDD´s,
but if I try to write anything onto the virtual drive, I get access denied

The only way I found, how to get "normal" access to my data is to copy the
entire content of the drive elsewhere, delete the partition(s) from the
drive, create new partitions, format them under Vista and copy all the
content back

Is there a way to set the access rights without this huge detour?

thanks in advance
Thomas