Windows 7: I salvaged my old hard drive to an external enclosure.(

I put my old hard drive into an external enclosure.(XP home) How can I transfer my files to my new laptop?

Windows 7 says to export the transfer utility to my old computer. My old computer won't boot up. I think the motherboard fried.

Is there any way to import these files for transfer into my laptop from the (now) external hard drive?

I tried importing pics and finding my music. Access was denied on the "import pics" command, and I cant even see my music libraries.

I used my creative mediasource5 sniffer to search for MP3's on my external drive E. It found hundreds of little sound bites from the program files, but not my music that is in the old creative mediasource5 libraries and Windows media player library.

Many of my documents aren't showing up when I browse the files on my old hard drive E.

I need some help, please.

Thanks,
Barry

If the drive isn't damaged, it should be as easy as plugging the external enclosure into your Windows 7 computer, then browsing the files. Are you able to use Windows Explorer to view the directories and files on the external drive?

You might have to take ownership rights to that HD when it is plugged in

When I plug it in to my laptop, I get an autoplay menu box with several options.

I have tried most of them including, 'view files with windows explorer'. I can only see a small fraction of my stuff.

[QUOTE=DocBrown;361459


You might have to take ownership rights to that HD when it is plugged in [/QUOTE]

How do I take ownership rights? Someone else told me that, but the link they gave would've required a download that changed my registry. I was leary of messing with the registry, so I am still looking for a solution.

No registry hacks are necessary. You just right click on the drive icon, select security, then advanced, and one of the tabs is an ownership tab. I'm going from memory here, so I might have missed something.

I couldn't take ownership of the files in the recommended way. I guess that only takes ownership of the files you can see.

I decided to browse some of the files I could see and clicked on the documents and settings folders. There were a couple of users listed.
Administrator, and CPuser and something else. I remembered that the guy who set up my computer for me fixed it so I could just turn it on and go to work without signing in. Apparently I was automatically signed in as CPuser.

When I clicked on CPuser, I got a dialog box that said I didn't have access to those files. And there was a check box to permanently take control of the files. I clicked on it and waited about a minute or two and all my lost files showed up. 15 gigs worth.

Thanks for the help.
Barry

I am having the same problems: fried my MB but aparently good XP HD. So I purchased a new Windows 7 Core i7 machine to do video editing along with the photography editing.

I can get into and transfer any USER files (Administrator, etc) on the salvaged-XP-and-put-in-an-external-FireWire-enclosure-drive, EXCEPT I cannot get into my own User/Henry (it even denies me from seeing the file structure within my User/Henry) to transfer various files I need access to ... and am unable to "take ownership" — Windows 7 will not let me. (There were no passwords or logons involved with that XP HD, btw).

Any help would be appreciated. If worse comes to worse, I suppose I can put it into one of my lab's older XP machines, save the stuff out from there (to DVD, whathaveyou), then put it onto the Windows 7 box, but that is very time consuming and I really should not have to do that. It should be as easy as I have done in the past with older Win versions: put the drive in an external enclosure and transfer the files. Period.

Thanks for any help!

Try the steps here - Windows 7 Take Ownership & Grant Permissions to Access Files & Folder

I had Googled that site last night and followed the steps with no luck. Perhaps I missed something, though, so will try again this evening. The thing that frustrates me though, is whenever Windows 7 fusses at me it demounts that external drive and I have to turn it off and back on for Windows 7 to recognize it again (only when trying to "take ownership" of my own directory ... like I said, all other files on that drive are accessible).