2nd HDD SATA

[Sallad61]

Hi to you,am in a bit of jam &need some advice please?.have built my wife a new PC & dismantled the old one so I could use her 2nd HDD with all her music & important data on it ( D/:drive on XP machine).Problem is that the new build has Win7 Pro installed on it & partitioned the 1TB SATA HDD to have space 350GB, so could xfer all old files from xp HDD after adding it to the new PC!. At time did not know that Win7 doesn`t recognise XP data when I add 2nd drive, so need to workout how I can do this without sacrificing all the memorabilea?. Any advice is going to help me heaps. Am cert3 Cisco Qualified Network Admin &you`d think I`d of known better!,prob being Learnt all my skills on &thru XP era. thanking you Dallas

 

[Night Hawk]

Welcome to the Seven Forums! Sallad61

Your problem is a quick fix requiring a quick trip in the Disk Management tool in Windows 7 in order to make sure the old drive is seen as "online" and you are able to right lcick on the main volume of the drive to select a drive letter.

Once you had gone through the "new hardware found" and seen the autoplay flashing if Windows has already initialized the drive the drive will seen with a drive letter already selected by Windows. If you have to go into the DM to manually see this taken care of.

Often the New Volume wizard will appear once you first go to right click on the drive listing there if found online. The attached images show how that works.

 

[Sallad61]

Hi NightHawk, yes I got the PC to recognise the drive &assigned a drive letter &that is the easy part ok?,now the big problem is that what is on the old drive is not being shown. Things like our photo`s,music poetry plus lots of other stuff that was on the drive orignally in 1st place & am not sure how to get the new PC to read it!. My wife is heartbroken as it has all her nostalgic memories on it. Can anyone explain what to do now please?

 

[Night Hawk]

Is the drive letter you assigned seen in Windows Explorer? The first thing is to make sure you have full access to the drive once Windows has mounted the present volume on it as a logical drive. And the word logical doesn't specify an extended volume since that applies to primary partitions as well to avoid any confusion on that.

The next step when no files are found is the use of a data recovery program that can detect and reassemble the structures of each file and folder. Someone who reformatted a storage drive by accident found the use of the freeware Recuva was able to rescue some 95% of the files thought lost from one drive. The retail programs on the other hand run about $70-!

The lack of finding files is a little buggy suggesting the Master File Table(MFT) may have lost some information or the drive still hasn't been fully initialized.

Can you post a snipping of the Disk Management view of the drives. Once you have the DM open for viewing you can use the snipping tool found in the Start>Accessories and grab a capture of that and upload it here with the paperclip option.

That will show the state of the drives as they appear now and can useful in diagnosing problems. You also may only have to see a full system restart with the drive letter now assigned for the files to appear. This would be another thing to try.

 

[gregrocker]

Can you put the HD back in the XP machine and transfer the data over using another method?

Wireless network, ethernet cable ad-hoc network, USB flash stick, external USB HD or DVD are all options.

The data from an XP HD should be readable by Win7 unless you formatted over it. The way to know for sure you have not is to put it back in the XP machine to read it.

 

[Night Hawk]

Another thought to consider is the amount of file fragmentation. You can have a drive with 0% fragmentation while individual files can see a high fragmentation level. I've run into here when files have been moved around from drive to drive or even trying to recover files from data disks burned on an older system that became unreadable.

Meanwhile the latest version of Recuva can be downloaded from the home site seen at Recuva - Undelete, Unerase, File and Disk Recovery - Free Download