Swapping storage hdd to win7 from xp

denisg · 02 Dec 2011

Can anyone help.

I have a 500gb hdd in my current but nearly dead xp machine which has only ever been used for the storage of photographs. I have ordered my new win 7 machine and would like to do a plain swap from the old machine to the new.

However, although the old drive has only ever had 2 main folders with lots of sub folders for photo categories, I notice that there are lots of other folders on there which appear to have been placed there by xp. Example:

What I would like to know is if I will need to delete all the files other than Photofile and OrigBkup, will the new 'puter accept the drive or are these actually needed for the swap. This drive is a Sata one and it will be going (hopefully) into a new i5 2500k machine with 2 1tb Sata 3 drives. All my files on the old drive are backed up anyway so it's not a major problem as I could always reformat the drive in the old machine to clean state, but as the thing is it's on it's last legs I think I would hate it to die halfway through.

Thanks for your time looking.

My best regards.

Den.

Corazon · 02 Dec 2011

You don't have to delete these folders, but you certainly can do so. Your new system will consider anything on the harddisk as simply data, nothing more.

If you do want to reformat the drive for whatever reason, it would be best to do so using the new system, not the old one, to avoid any possible issues (although they wouldn't be serious at all).

denisg · 02 Dec 2011

Thank you for that, most appreciated. Now i just have to wait for the new one to be built and delivered to see what Win 7 throws at my ancient grey cells.

Thank heavens for W7F. I'm being typically pessimistic and working through the various threads to pre-empt problems that hopefully dont arise

Thanks again.

Den

JimLewandowski · 02 Dec 2011

I always thought that decomissioning (uninstalling via Device Manager) was useful for removing a HD and moving to another machine. I thought this had something to do with SIDs (Security IDs) within NTFS (filesystem).

I moved a drive from an XP to 7 machine and had some orphaned SIDs and a slightly different default security/SID arrangement on the drive.

denisg · 02 Dec 2011

Hi Jim. Was this SID's problem after you uninstalled the drive or did you just do a straight swap at the time?

Den.

Corazon · 02 Dec 2011

Uninstalling a drive through Device Manager will do nothing to the SIDs. That's a feature of the NTFS filesystem and that info is saved on the disk itself.

If you experience problems accessing files on a drive previously used by another system, taking ownership of them will usually get the issue solved.

Add "Take Ownership" shortcut to your Explorer context menu

JimLewandowski · 02 Dec 2011

denisg said:

Hi Jim. Was this SID's problem after you uninstalled the drive or did you just do a straight swap at the time?

Den.

I did NOT "uninstall" my drive. I simply unplugged and moved. I never had problems reading OR writing files (ownership), but the default SID/permissions users are different between XP and W7. Hence, one niggle did bother me and I fixed it (another thread on here by me about right-click delete option not providing delete confirmation popup).

JimLewandowski · 02 Dec 2011

Corazon said:

Uninstalling a drive through Device Manager will do nothing to the SIDs. That's a feature of the NTFS filesystem and that info is saved on the disk itself.

If you experience problems accessing files on a drive previously used by another system, taking ownership of them will usually get the issue solved.

Add "Take Ownership" shortcut to your Explorer context menu

I wonder why it's recommend, then, to "uninstall" the drive from the old PC????

I thought maybe it simply neutered (delete) the SIDs off the ROOT of the drive itself and hence, made the daughter files/folders' SIDs then "orphaned".