HDD needs formatting under Win7 but is ok in XP

Squirly150 · 25 Jan 2013

As the title states, I have a hard drive from a laptop hat has a bad fan and I want to take the data off and put it on a new laptop. The old laptop was Vista 32bit and the new laptop is Windows 7 Professional 64bit. I plug the disk into a caddy and connect the usb cable and Windows 7 says I have to format the drive before I can use it. In Disk Manager it shows fine but with no drive letter and all option except delete partition greyed out.
I take the caddy to an XP machine and it shows up fine. Yes I can drag all the files I need from here onto a thumb drive and then over to Win 7 but why should I have to? Why doesn't Win 7 see this drive correctly?

ICIT2LOL · 25 Jan 2013

Hello and welcome Squirly mate I don't know why the drive is not recognised but frankly I think what you said you can do you will have to. If you format obviously you are going to lose the lot.

Now I use Ubuntu a fair bit for retrieving data from drives that are unaccessible for whatever reason and I usually do what you have suggested doing - however it might just transfer them using the Ubuntu OS as in from the Vista drive to the 7 drive directly. As I said I have never tried this but it is worth a shot.

If you want to proceed post back for more info:).

Squirly150 · 26 Jan 2013

Thanks for the response mate. I tried running chkdsk on the drive but it failed. Spinrite didn't want to touch it until some errors had been corrected. There was over 65Gigs of data so the thumb drive was out and the first couple of attempts to copy to the lappy's desktop failed. Eventually I got all the data onto the xp laptop and took that hdd out and slapped it into another caddy and was able to take that to the new machine.

So apparently XP is more forgiving about drive errors than Win7. I will do some extensive testing on that hdd after formatting and see if it comes up bad. It's only 2.5 years old so I'll RMA it to Western Digital if it fails. All I can say is thank God for XP as I haven't dabbled in Linux since before the millennium. ;-)

ICIT2LOL · 26 Jan 2013

Good stuff Squirly yes mate I have several machine now due to my addiction to building but I still have two XP's that I can fall back on if need be. Yes you are right in a sense that XP isn't so fussy about filing systems and therefore very useful.

As for Western Digital mate they should be ok now as they are owned by Toshiba although I have never been a big fan of theirs either. I prefer Seagate to be honest they own Maxtor and Samsung (hard drives) now and I have never had a problem with them.

There is a WD drive tester at WD Support / Downloads / SATA & SAS / WD Blue / SE / SE16 (SATA II) if you want to try that one - nothing to lose eh?:)