Moving Hard Drive to new OS

I have an Acer Aspire (Windows Vista HP 32bit) that won't get out of startup repair. I made many hardware manipulations and did my best to get out of it and I finally called it quits. But that's not the problem. I took out the hard drive and bought a custom computer that I built without using any parts from my Acer Aspire (but the HDD). The hard drive I bought for it is a Samsung SP 1 TB and I also purchased Windows 7 HP 64bit. I booted it up and everything went well until I tried hooking up my old Seagate with 2 years of stuff on it from my Acer Aspire. My new build read both partitioned drives (160 GB and 160 GB), but the only files on the C Drive it read were program files and useless stuff. The meat and potatoes (my documents, pictures, videos, projects, music, etc...) I cannot find. Ive tried stuff in the Device Manager and Disk Management but I can't seem to find it. I'm worried the only way I can retrieve is back on my broken Acer. All help is appreciated.

The C Drive is my new 1 TB and my E and F drives are the partitioned letters on my old 320 GB. If some screenshots help I could provide them.

OMG YOU FIXED IT THANK YOU SO MUCH. I've been trying to figure this out all day! One more thing though, it won't give me permission to enter my music, videos and stuff but I can finally see them.

Thanks for the help, you saved my life.

allday165 said:

I have an Acer Aspire (Windows Vista HP 32bit) that won't get out of startup repair. I made many hardware manipulations and did my best to get out of it and I finally called it quits. But that's not the problem. I took out the hard drive and bought a custom computer that I built without using any parts from my Acer Aspire (but the HDD). The hard drive I bought for it is a Samsung SP 1 TB and I also purchased Windows 7 HP 64bit. I booted it up and everything went well until I tried hooking up my old Seagate with 2 years of stuff on it from my Acer Aspire. My new build read both partitioned drives (160 GB and 160 GB), but the only files on the C Drive it read were program files and useless stuff. The meat and potatoes (my documents, pictures, videos, projects, music, etc...) I cannot find. Ive tried stuff in the Device Manager and Disk Management but I can't seem to find it. I'm worried the only way I can retrieve is back on my broken Acer. All help is appreciated.

If you can't find it, try following:
Boot from a System Repair Disc.
Go to a command prompt.
Run DiskPart
Use the DiskPart list volume command.

The idea here is to locate the drive number, volume which has been assigned to your "missing" drive.

Then use the good old dos commands to copy the files over to another disk.

If you don't like using diskpart, then just do following:
c:
dir
D:
dir
e:
dir
f:
dir
g:
dir
h:
dir

you get the idea. You want to locate the drive letter which has been assigned to your missing drive.

The recovery environment program which was loaded from the System Repair Disc does not use the letters you might be expecting. In fact, the recovery environment is running from X:

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DISC - CREATE A SYSTEM REPAIR DISC
START | type System Repair | Enter key | Create Disc button
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COMMAND PROMPT - GO TO A COMMAND PROMPT USING A SYSTEM REPAIR DISC
1) Insert System Repair Disc into optical reader.
2) Shutdown your computer.
3) Boot up your computer from the System Repair Disc
If your computer doesn’t boot from the optical drive, then
Immediately after pushing your Power ON button, start tapping the F2 key to get to the BIOS to change the boot order.OR
Immediately after pushing your Power ON button, start tapping the F12 key and choose CD/DVD to change the boot order only for this time.
4) Wait while a mini-version of Windows is loaded and finally the System Recovery Options dialog appears.
5) SYSTEM RECOVERY OPTIONS dialog |
Select a keyboard input method |
NEXT button
6) SYSTEM RECOVERY OPTIONS dialog
will search your system for installed versions of Windows.
7) SYSTEM RECOVERY OPTIONS dialog |
select the Use recovery tools that can help fix problems starting Windows radio button |
NEXT button
8) SYSTEM RECOVERY OPTIONS |
Choose a recovery tool |
9) Click on command prompt from the list shown

Run any desired commands and type EXIT when finished.
Remove the System Repair Disc.
Shutdown your computer.
Power on your computer.
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VIEW DRIVE LETTERS
Type following commands. Hit ENTER key after each command.
DISKPART starts the DiskPart program
LIST VOLUME shows drive letter assignment

now that was easy. Just type exit to exit the diskpart program.