[NTLUG:Discuss] Interesting problem?

[Fred]

OK, gurus, here's one:

I just installed opensuse 11.2  in a new (to me) box on a new drive 
because the old system cpu had brain cancer and was dying. So,
I moved the old drive into the new box. I decided to copy all the data
from the old /home/user1 to the new /home/user1 (mounted old drive 
as /home2, if you wondered). All the files in the old user1 are owned
by user1 and belong to the users group, just like the new user1.

Some of you who know the answer are way ahead of me now... 

When I log in as user1, I cannot enter any dot directory in the old 
drive's user1 area. Root can, of course, but why cannot user1?
If I copy them over with root, their ownership/group becomes root.
If I then reset the owner/group to user1/users, they still cannot
be accessed by user1.

The error says that I do not have permissions to enter that directory.
Why? What is different in the system? Both users are the same name
and belong to the same group... at least, as far as I can see. 
Obviously there is some difference.

I could have sworn I was able to do this once on some earlier 
version of Linux, but not now, no how.

How do I fix it? How do I get the contents of those directories
into the new /home/user1 so that he can read them?

Thanks in advance,
Fred