Please help: Macbook Pro boots to wallpaper and beachball!

[carves]

Hey there. I was about to TimeMachine my late '08 Macbook Pro and then migrate all my data to my new iMac. It said I needed to update flash first though. I did, and now all I get when I reboot is my wallpaper with a spinning beachball on it. How do I fix this?

 

[carves]

I happen to have a second admin account on this machine. If I log into that, everything works fine, and I can see the folders of my data in my primary account, but I can't access them because that account doesn't have permission (seems to kind of defeat the purpose of having admin privlidges, doesn't it?)

Is there any hack/work-around to see these files?

I can also see these folders (but can't open them due to lack of permissions) in some of my Time Machine Backups on my network drive, but when I try to restore from one of those backups, it says there are no volumes there.