Need permissions for second partition..

[jimpido]

Alright, so I've done everything I can think of to get this to work and now I'm just stuck... So I've been stuck on 10.10 for a while and for some reason felt the need to upgrade to 11.10 and now I feel it was a terrible idea. In the middle of my upgrade my system over heated and shutdown. when i started it back up, it gave me my long list of old kernel versions (as usual) but when i selected any of them, nothing would happen, It was just stuck at a flashing underscore. so I tried to move all my important files from the drive to an external via Live CD. Lack of permissions didnt allow me to do this, so I created a new user within the Live CD with the same name and password as what was used with my old home folder, this worked, until ahlf way through the file transfer, my dog pulled the usb cable out and knocked over my backup drive, destroying all the contents. >_< So now after my rain of badluck, I went in to just install 10.10 along side the corrupted 11.10 and it wouldnt allow me to, so instead, I installed 10.10 into my swap drive (after formatting and using the ext4 file system of course) So now im back to my wonderful 10.10 with my user credentials all the same as my old 10.10 but i still cant do anything with the rest of my files from the main partition.

basically, all i want to do is acquire permissions somehow so that i can delete all of the old system files except my home folder, resize my main partition down, move the files over to my "new" home folder within the old swap partition and resize again to create a new swap...

btw: my system is running a RAID 0 with three 320gb drives, making many partitioning programs not work. (they see the drives as separate instead of together as one)

any help would be great. Im just lost now and cant get my permissions. =[

Thank you in advance if your actually reading all this.