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Search/view problems in Win 7 with ext HDD containing Windows folders
I have looked online for hours, reading various forum threads in the hopes that I can figure this out myself, but to no avail. Maybe I'm just using the wrong search terminology and someone here will know the answer if I put it in layman's terms? My problem is that I frequently help people clean off malware or recover data by pulling the hard drive from a problem computer, and attaching it to a host, via a USB external caddy. I also frequently restore or share files that way (dragging over what I want manually, rather than using system backups). When a host computer is running XP, I never have any problem using Windows Explorer to view system folders and subfolders on a slave drive, and I can get to whatever files I need to manage in a straightforward fashion, by searching, or clicking from a traditional "tree" view. If, for example, I needed access to E:/Users/Bob/My Music/iTunes, then I could access that location without a problem, because any system folders in a path beginning with E: were always treated as totally distinct from anything in a path beginning with C: Since migrating to Windows 7 on a number of my host computers, I have found that whenever I'm trying to work with an external drive that has Windows on it, (regardless of the version), Windows Explorer will automatically replace views and search results for my external drive, with the contents of similar folders on the INTERNAL drive! Since I am usually dealing with folders that have common default names and storage locations, like "Users" or "Documents", the refusal to show my external "duplicates" is a real problem. The drives that I connect externally are generally fairly large, and they change constantly, so it's not like I can just add the contents of one drive to an index on the host computer and be done with it; in fact I don't want to index any of this stuff, I just need for ALL the folders and subfolders on EACH external drive to automatically be treated by my Windows 7 host computer as a totally separate entity from the internal drive, just like they were in XP, even if the master contains system folders which share the same name or path. Can this be fixed in Windows Explorer, or do I need to start using a 3rd party software to search and manage external drives? It doesn't seem to have anything to do with security or permissions on the externals, nor with what OS is on there, nor even with view settings (I always have hidden and system files set to visible when I work) and it continues to happen even if try to specify a detailed/filtered search that excludes my internal. Any thoughts on how to fix this, or should I just go back to using an XP host when I work?
Last edited by TheeInferno; 14 Apr 2011 at 20:45.