Windows 10: Accessing Vista Hard drive from Windows 10 Laptop

I am trying to recover music and photos from an old Vista hard drive using my Windows 10 laptop. I have a Sata to USB cable that seems to be working tested with a newer hard drive. However when I plug in the old Vista hard drive I can see no way to access the contents via file manager etc. Is there a way for me to do so, and if so, how?

Any help would be appreciated.

:)

 

Accessing a Hard Drive...

...from a dead laptop.

My girlfriend's laptop recently s**t the bed, and she has a lot of photos she would like to retrieve from it. I used a USB to IDE cable to try, but it's a no go. Her drive has Windows XP Home on it, and my system has Win7 x64. The computer recognizes the drive, but it wants me to initialize it, which I think may format it.

I don't know if it's formatted FAT32 or NTFS. Are there any suggestions on accessing the drive to pull all this data off of it?

 

How to Partiton a Hard Drive in Vista

This is a way to get Vista to see another hard drive that is not associated with the OS. There is some times when your new hdd doesn't seem to want to work well with Vista. But, there is a solution in it.

Open the Computer Management By doing these steps.

• Click on the Start Button
• Click on Control Panel
• Click Administrative Tools
• Double click on Computer Management

You are now in the Navigation panel of the Computer Management.
When in Computer Management, you then have to allow the new drive to be recognized.

• Double click on Storage
• Double click on Disk Management

Now in the middle of your screen there is the layout of the Disk Drives that you have. The drives that are partitioned will show by the drive lettering. The others will just show up as having nothing at all in them. Below that there will be the Disk drives that are installed into the computer. You'll see that the primary one will all ways read as "Disk 0". Then you will have Disk 1 and so on. Under the Disks there will also see your CD-Rom drives.. If there is more then one, it will be labeled the same as Disk drives..

On to the Partitioning of the drive in question.

• Right Click on the drive
• Click to format the drive or Enable Volume. There will be a series of windows that open up. This is Vista's formatting. Just go threw the windows, and make sure everything is the way you want it to happen.
• Once the formatting is done, will take some time depending on the drive size.
• Right click on the drive
• Click on Mark the Partition as Active

After you have done those steps, The drive will be up and running threw Vista.



:Side Notes:
If you are not the Administer to the Os, then you will have to enable it..
You may also want to redo the drive lettering of it all. But, I really don't see a reason to do so. If you do, you have to redo drive paths and so forth.. A lot of work on something so small...

 

Unable to access the external hard drive after upgrading to Windows 10

Hi Alan,

As you are facing issues with accessing the external hard drive after upgrading to Windows 10, do not worry we will help you with this issue.

Do provide us additional information to assist you better with this issue:

• What is the make and model of your devices?
• What exactly happens when you try to access the drive?
• What is the complete error message/ error code of this issue?
• Were you able to detect the device under Device Manager/ File Explorer?

Step 1: As a workaround, I suggest you to do the following to detect the issue:

• Connect the hard drive to different port and check if the issue persists.
• Connect different hard drive to the same port and check.
• Connect different hard drives to different ports and check.

Step 2: If the device is not detected on your computer try to run
Hardware and Devices troubleshooter as it checks for common problems and makes sure that any new device or hardware connected to your PC is installed correctly.

• Press Windows key from the keyboard, type
  Troubleshooting and select it.
• Click on view all option on the upper left corner of
  Troubleshooting window.
• Select the Hardware and Device
  options from the list.
• Click Next to run the Hardware and Device
  Troubleshooter

Step 3: I suggest you to check if there are any drivers with yellow exclamatory mark in the Device Manager.

• Press Windows + X from the keyboard, click on
  Device Manager.
• Right click on the detected driver, click on Properties
  and check the device status.
  

Hope it helps. Try the above and update us the status of this issue with the required information, we will be happy to help you further.

Thank you.