Windows 10: Problems Moving HDD (And Data On It) to Windows 10 From Older Win Sys

I have an old Windows 98 system that I have had around for years and have been preparing to move anything of importance from it to a Windows 10 system in preparation for discarding the Win 98 system. I rarely use it anymore and no longer back up files on it but still would like to move the remaining files on it to a Windows 10 system if possible.

I’m not sure how healthy the HDD on it is however. There is only one HDD on it and the last time I attempted to boot from it, the system said that it could not find a HDD to boot from. I checked and made sure that the drive was spinning and it was spinning normally. I then tried to boot from a CDROM based WIN 98 system and again, the BIOS couldn’t find a boot drive, even after I changed the boot sequence.

Suspecting a possibly bad HDD but not sure whether I had a bad HDD or a bad WIN 98 CPU, I moved the entire IDE HDD to a Windows 10 system, connected it via an IDE/SATA adapter and powered it up as a secondary drive in the Windows 10 system. This time, the BIOS on the Windows 10 system found the old IDE HDD and Disk Management on the Windows 10 system found the drive as well and displayed its capacity.

What DM on the WIN 10 system will NOT let me do however is make the old WIN98 HDD fully useable under the new WIN 10 system. Instead, it displays a message saying that the IDE drive needs to be INITIALIZED under the WIN 10 system which I cannot do of course since it would destroy the data on the drive.

Is there a way for me to recover the data from this HDD under WIN 10? It is not critical data and as such is not backed up. Still, I would like to recover as much of it as possible. As near as I can tell, I should be able to move that old HDD drive into a WIN10 system and read the data from it if the drive is intact. Is that true? If so, do I have a bad HDD and if I do, would rebuilding the MBR on it possibly help?

Thanks for any help.

:)

 

Windows 10 pro HDD exchange

I have an old Dell Latitude E5400 with Win10 pro and all my data plus apps installed on a 1Tb HDD. I have acquired a newer laptop Lenovo T420 with Win 10 pro but it only has a 160Gb HDD.

Is it possible to move the 1Tb HDD to the newer Lenovo without having to re install everything.

I plan on passing the older Dell E5400 on to help someone else, with the smaller 160Gb HDD

Both laptops are Win 10 upgrades and not OEM install.

Many thanks.

 

Secondary hard drive users folder after W10 anniversary update was renamed to pictures and displayed pictures icon

I had a similar problem with the Windows Creator update to Win 10. My SSD has the OS and programmes on it. The HDD has my personal data files. When I accepted the Win Creator update, it ended up transferring the HDD files to the SSD (totally filling it)
and I could not use the computer. It was a lot of work to restore it to having the data files back on the HDD since the SSD overflowed and there was little working space left. DaveM121's solution of reestablishing the symbolic links and moving the data will
hopefully help with the next problems: Win10 is now insisting I accept the Win Creator update on my other machines (4 of them) where I have declined for several months.

Best of all would be in MS let one choose at the Creator Update where one has one's data files. Lots of people run a dual SSD HDD system.

 

Baring possibility that HDD has gone bad, there may be a problem with old FAT file system (16bit, practically DOS) and NTFS.
Try with some data recovery program like this:
Download MiniTool Power Data Recovery Free Edition - MajorGeeks
Download Puran File Recovery Portable - MajorGeeks
And/or with any free program on that page.