Windows 10: New Windows 10 machine. Old external Win7 Hard drive

I recently had my Win7 machine fail on me. The hard drive is fine, so I bought a new Win10 laptop. I want to transfer my files and programs over from the old Win 7 drive to the new Win 10 computer.


I have it mounted externally already. I can not boot to the Win7 external, to run Windows Easy Transfer.


Is there a way to do this easily?

:)

 

unrecognised external hard drive on Windows 10

Since you already reinstalled the drivers of the External Hard Drive, let's run the
Hardware and Devices troubleshooter as it can resolve your concern. You can do that by following these steps:

• 
  Press the Start button.
  
• 
  Type and select Troubleshooting.
  
• 
  Click on View all on the left panel.
  
• 
  Select and run the Hardware and Devices troubleshooter.
  

If the Hardware and Devices troubleshooter doesn’t resolve your concern, we suggest that you change the letter of the External Hard Drive. You can do that by following these steps:

• 
  Press the Start button.
  
• 
  Type and select Control panel.
  
• 
  Select System and Security.
  
• 
  Select Administrative Tools, and a new window will appear.
  
• 
  Double-click Computer Management, and a new window will appear.
  
• 
  Select Disk Management that is located under
  Storage in the left pane.
  
• 
  Right click on the External Hard Drive that is not showing on the File Explorer.
  
• 
  Select Change letter and network path, and a new window will appear.
  
• 
  Select Change, and choose the letter that you want for the External Hard Drive.
  

After changing the letter of the External Hard Drive, we suggest that you reboot your laptop for the changes to take effect.



Let us know how it goes.



Regards.

 

Old Hard drive to new hard drive

I now have my old hard drive converted to an external drive and am wondering what is the best way to move files from the old to the new. I was thinking of booting the old drive and saving the files I want to the cloud and then downloading them to my new
computer. Does anyone have any other suggestions?

 

External Hard Drive and Windows 10

Best thing to do is to start from scratch as someone else in this forum also suggested.

If there is important data on your drive it is probably even best NOT to connect your external hard drive (or even an USB stick) at all to the Windows 10 machine.

You may lose your data along the way if you do so.

If there is important data on the external drive first do a backup in a different way.

For example by copying the files over a network (or to the Cloud) or by preparing a (brand) new external drive first on a Windows 10 machine.

Transfer the data from the old to the new drive on a(n) (old) Windows machine that has no issues.

Quote from the other user in this forum:

“The solution probably lies in attaching the drive to the Windows 10 computer and opening Disk Management. (Right click on Start and choose Disk Management.) If the drive appears as a raw dirve only, initialize
it and assign a drive letter. If Disk Management does recognize it as a regular drive, delete the partition and create a new one. In both cases reformat the drive with NTFS. (Accept defaults) After all that, check it on the Windows 7 computer..."