Thread: XP Hard Drive Issue...Need Some Help...

Old NTFS-partitioned hard drive with tons of files on it (Mom's old stuff). I slapped it into an enclosure and connected it up. Her computer recognizes the hard drive and lists the hard drive in My Computer (G:/), yet I cannot see the contents of the drive in Explorer. If I double click the drive icon, I get a new window that's just plain blank. Right-click Properties shows the drive is nearly full. Windows Backup allows me to go into the drive, select whatever files I want, and run the backup process (meaning I can see the files on that drive in that program, but not in Explorer).

I want to be able to just use Explorer to find the **** she wants to keep and move it over to her new drive, but I can't figure out what the issue is that's keeping me from seeing the contents of the external drive.

Help?

TIA

Does the old drive have windows installed on it? i.e. was it the primary boot drive on the old pc?

I've heard that can cause problems like you are having.

Yep. It was the system drive of her old PC. Is there a fix?

This may work...

Turn off the Indexing service (Control Panel>Administrative Tools>Services; scroll down to, double click on Indexing, click the Stop button, try moving the files again). That fixes the "file in use" most of the time.

If that doesn't work or you get a message about "access denied" and something about "permissions," follow the steps in the MS KB article, How to take ownership of a file or folder in Windows XP to get to your files.

The "Read only" setting on folders is meaningless and Windows ignores it. Check any folder (not file) on the drive and you'll see they're all marked "read only." Nobody but Microsoft programmers know why.


Also, be sure the old drive is formatted the same way as the new drive on the pc is (obviously don't reformat or you'll lose everything)

Lastly, you might need to boot from the old drive in order to access everything and move it...pain, but will work. Then you can wipe windows and reformat the drive.

Right-click on the drive and choose properties
Click on the security tab
Click on Advanced at the bottom
Click on the Owner tab
Click the Edit button
Click on the Administrators group
Place a checkmark next to Replace owner on subcontainers
CLick OK and it will reindex the permissions on each filke on the drive.

See if that helps.

CD

Right clicking and choosing Properties shows me no Security tab. I have General, AutoPlay, Tools, Hardware, Sharing, and Quota.

Alrighty...pulled the external off her old XP machine and put it on my 7 machine. I found the security tab and it's working on changing ownerships now. Hopefully, I'll be able to read the drive on her machine after it's done. If not, hopefully I'll be able to read it on my machine, copy the "keep" files, then reformat this bitch to put the files back on it and try connecting it to the XP machine.

Nope. Didn't work. Still can't see what's on the drive.

So I tried right click, Copy, hoping to copy the contents of the drive to a different drive on my computer. It created a folder called "Local Disk" and copied all the files (the properties of the folder says there's data there (like 120gb worth), but if I double click the folder, it says "This Folder Is Empty."