Retrieving data from hard drive

Backbiter

I've accepted that my old XP PC is not worth repairing and invested in a new one. I'm anxious to transfer the data to the new one and a colleague in work installed the old hard drive as a secondary drive, which the new PC recognised.
What's weird (and maddening, not to mention very worrying) is that in Explorer I could see the list of programmes that were installed, but was unable to find any of my files other than a few rescued documents which weren't in any folder. There are approx. 15GB of files on the drive - mainly Word, Excel and PowerPoint, plus quite a lot of music (WMA) files. I was told they would be in 'Documents and Settings' but they weren't. I tried to search for particular files and folders on the drive, but with no joy. Checking properties of the drive showed up that it contained the right amount of data, but I just couldn't find it!!
My colleague took it away to try to hook it up to another PC, but was making pessimstic noises.
How could this amount of data be not accessible? Has my colleague missed a trick?
All help and advice greatly appreciated.

Gadge_2

I would use the built in search and search the old drive with a wider set of parameters for *.doc, *.xls and *.ppt, instead of particular files, making sure that I was looking in hidden system files and folders as well.
This would throw up a cart load of files, ie every file that ends in .doc, .xls and .ppt on each time you run the search and hopefully in there somewhere should be the files you are looking for

Sorry if you have already tried this

Good Luck

amcluesent

It's posible that (assuming you used NTFS) the Master File Table has been corrupted, losing the index of files. That could just be a coincidence of moving the disk.

However, did you have some particular access permissions set on your files on the old PC, or use the NTFS encrypted file system are use a software disk compression system? If any of these were used, the new PC wouldn't have the keys or software to show the files, even though space is being allocated on the disk.

Backbiter

The files are in the administrator's 'My Documents' folder, which has (had) a password log-on on the old PC. I used this log-on daily - would it still be needed to access the data on the drive? If so, when/ where would I enter it?
I did mention this to my colleague but she said that wouldn't affect the accessibility of the files. Other than the password log-on, no files were encrypted or protected in any way.

The music and sound files were in 'My music', my photos were in 'My Pictures', and my files were in My Documents. All of these folders are visible in Explorer but 'Properties' indicates that they have just a few Mbs of data - nothing like the several Gigs that I know are on there. And yet Properties shows that the drive does contain 15Gbs of data!

The old PC did have few other user accounts and a Guest log-on, so there were a few different 'My Documents' folders on there.

ABH_3

Backbiter wrote:

The files are in the administrator's 'My Documents' folder, which has (had) a password log-on on the old PC. I used this log-on daily - would it still be needed to access the data on the drive? If so, when/ where would I enter it?
I did mention this to my colleague but she said that wouldn't affect the accessibility of the files. Other than the password log-on, no files were encrypted or protected in any way.

How to take ownership of a file or folder in Windows XP
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=308421

HTH

Backbiter

Thanks for that link. That's what my colleague had to do when she put it in another machine - from which I was able to recover all my files (massive relief). She was still mystified why my brand new PC wouldn't allow her to do what she did on an old machine.