Get files from old HDD - Convert to external Drive

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I had a PC (XP) that is pretty much toast, I believ the HDD was still good though and it has some data on it that I'd really like to recover. I pulled the drive from teh old PC and got an enclosure for it.

When I try to access the drive after attaching it to the new (Vista) PC. I see that the drive is there but there is no drive letter. I set the jumper to Slave already and i see the drive in the BIOS settings. I am able to get the drive information in Disk Management and it says it is "Healthy (Active, Primary Partitin)" I have tried rebooting the new PC, switching USB ports and moving the jumper setting to OS.

Any suggestions would be a great help.
 
I had the same problem and I'm so sorry! Zenosinck solved it for me. See the topic

https://www.techspot.com/vb/topic104141.html

if you can't do this using the directions from Microsoft (see his link) because of the disparity in OS, you might try the Linux (Ubuntu (free) and NTFS-3G (also free)) solution if you don't mind (and can) adding a dual boot to your Vista machine. Otherwise, ask folks around your neighborhood if they have XP and would share. :)

Good luck.
 
I just thought of one other thing you can try. I used StellarInfo a long time ago. It worked. They have a demo you can download. Run the demo and it will tell you if it can recover files and which ones it can. It is easy to use but will cost $$.

http://www.stellarinfo.com/download.htm

If you don't like that one just google "hard drive recovery" (with quotes) and you'll get plenty of hits.
 
Try setting the hard drive jumper to master. When in an enclosure, slave doesn't apply.
 
Nope

I tried every jumper setting sorry that was CS i not OS earlier poor typing. I even tried no Jumper at all. Setting the jumper to Master was worse. The drive was not found at all.

Ruthe: I read the thread you suggested and I'm not sure I follow. I don't think my situation is exactly the same. It's not that I don'e see the data on the drive, I don't see the drive at all. I do see the drivers getting installed when I boot though. I also see it in the Bios config, so it's there... I also see it if I use disk managment but with no drive/partition letter and there is no way for me to change teh partitioning (that I know of) without losing all the data. I am currently downloading the knoppix linux distro though so I can try that option. It'll be a while for it to completely download.
 
I had to run Partitin Table Disk Doctor (PTDD) on th old drive. Once I did, I was able to see the drive. Part of the problem might have been because the old drive "thought" it was still c:\
 
jderonck said:
I had a PC (XP) that is pretty much toast, I believ the HDD was still good though and it has some data on it that I'd really like to recover. I pulled the drive from teh old PC and got an enclosure for it.

When I try to access the drive after attaching it to the new (Vista) PC. I see that the drive is there but there is no drive letter. I set the jumper to Slave already and i see the drive in the BIOS settings. I am able to get the drive information in Disk Management and it says it is "Healthy (Active, Primary Partitin)" I have tried rebooting the new PC, switching USB ports and moving the jumper setting to OS.

Any suggestions would be a great help.

Most NTFS drives are locked down. It this a drive from work on a domain or home PC that was on workgroup. The home PC drive should be easy to access using it as a slave, but remember some older HDDs don't work in newer PCs. How old is the HDD. Plus some of these older HDDs can fail without you even knowing it.
 
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