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Second hard Drive - Retreiving Data

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by im_chaz

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I have a laptop running Vista, and I have a hard drive that I pulled off from an older computer which I had Windows XP running on it. I put that hard drive in a External enclosure and hooked it into my laptop using the USB cable.

My laptop does not see a drive letter associated with the new external drive. But when I go to my Device manager it sees it and when I go to my ADMINISTRATIVE TOOLS | COMPUTER MANAGEMENT | DISK MANAGEMENT, it sees the drive but it doesnt assign a drive letter to it. When I right click on it, the only option I can choose is HELP.

The external hard drive is not corrupted. Is this due to having WinXP on it? How do I get the data off it? I have 120 gb of music on it.

Thanks

2 replies

by oh smeg

Unlike Vista which is still a prototype System that is unproven yet. That is to actually work properly there is plenty of Anecdotal Evidence that it doesn't work at all though.

Now for the rub you will have some problems attempting to move your data or at least some of it to Vista because the formats are no longer the same.

Things like your Stored E-Mail are different if you use the default E-Mail Client and while you can transfer the data through a working computer running XP to Vista you are unable to move from a HDD that was loaded with XP to Vista.

Also if you had XP Pro installed it's possible that Windows Encrypted File System was running and it will be impossible to recover your data to a Vista Machine because the Encryption Method is different and you are unable to mount the XP Encryption Key in Vista and have it work.

The easy answer here is to connect to a XP computer and transfer the data across a LAN connection as these are not seen by Vista as a insecure source that needs to be formated by Vista to be secure.

Col

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