Recovering/Copying Files From Old Hard Drive - Help Me Or I Am Dead Meat To The Wife

[Phog Allen]

Good morning gents. Well, it was a good morning til I started trying to copy files from my old boot drive to the new one. To say things are amiss would be an understatement. Let me 'splain.

About a year ago my old 160Gb hard drive with XP Pro/Media Centre started making a LOT of noises. So in an attempt to head off disaster I bought and installed a new WD 500Gb hdd. I made it a new boot drive and it went pretty well and I was able to copy over all my old files by reinstalling the old drive in the second sata channel and copying directly by accessing it from My Computer as Drive E: No problems.

Trouble is, the WD started having issues a few months later. I do not think it was hit by viruses but that I somehow managed to damage the registry because I was getting all kinds of boot errors and just godawful performance, etc. Time to bail. I wanted to wipe the WD, buy another new 500Gb drive, make it the boot drive and the use the freshly cleaned and formatted WD for storage. I want to back up my DVDs and thought and extra 500Gig would be handy. So I made a folder on the desktop of the WD called For the Move and placed all the media files and word documents and any personal files in it. I then attempted to copy this over to the old 160Gb drive for temp storage till I got the boot drive issues sorted. I got an error telling me I did not have enough drive space to copy it. Dang. The folder was 30 gigs and I had only 24 gig of space. No problem I thought, I will just copy it direct from the WD to the new Seagate when I am done. Well today was the day I wanted to do it you can imagine the knot in my gut when I plugged the old WD in to the second sata channel this morning and there is NO For the Move folder! Good lord, what have I done here?!! I figured if the folder did not have enough room to copy and I pressed cancel, it would have just stopped. Now my first thought was that rather than click "copy" when I did this I clicked "cut". Would this cause a loss of data if the target drive did not have enough room? My wife will NOT be happy if a bunch of our photos are gone. Thankfully I had not tried to wipe either the WD 500 or the old 160 drives so a quick reinstall of the 160 revealed a bunch of the photos and media are on the old drive. Whew. But still, there are items on the 500 that need to be salvaged if possible.

Issues. When I plug the 500 into the second sata channel it will NOT allow me to access my old user profile. Does this have to do with having like named profile on my new drive? I logged out and logged back in with my wife's profile and I could still not access it. More's the worry is the disappearance of the large folder of documents and media. Help me out gents. I think there is likely a solution but I am just not seeing it.

Here's what I want eventually. Seagate 500Gb as new boot drive(current setup), WD500Gb wiped and formatted for storage only. Ancient 160Gb wiped and destroyed for security's sake. Thanks for any help.

Cheers, Todd

 

[Phog Allen]

One more thing. I looked at the 160Gb drive again and right there in the root directory is For the Move but it says it is empty and when I try to click on it I get the same "access denied" errors I get when I try to access my old profile on the WD500. Oi.

Cheers, Todd

 

[timsclips]

When copying data off of nonbootable hard drives, I use a bootable linux cd, as long as the hard drives are readable you will be able to copy data. Mint or PCLinuxOS cds both work well for this.

 

[Proinsias]

Another vote for linux, it's my go to for problem drives.

 

[smalltank]

put the old HD in it..as long as you can get to the data get a yearly subscription to carbonite.com $60..just select all your files and back there..install the new HD..then re download them..should fix it...worst case scenario go to your local pc shop..bestbuy or anywhere else you trust.

 

[SiBurning]

You should mount all of the drives, then log in as administrator, and then you should be able to access everything (as administrator). You might need to change permissions if you want everyone to access the stuff. The old profiles are unusable, and you'll need to install all of your applications and configure most of them from scratch. The hardest is likely to be email.

There are certainly other, more complicated, ways to upgrade a hard drive, but you can't move user accounts when installing fresh to a new drive. The only way to do that is if you have a domain manager and manage the profiles on the domain--something only done in a few corporate environments. Even then, you lose any locally installed applications.

 

[brianw]

Steve is absolutely correct

 

[CyiDev]

+1 for linux, it bypasses the user directory safeguards. If you have a mac available it will bypass it as well.

 

[Telecaster52]

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk

I've recovered files on completely dead HDD's with this one.

 

[Luc]

What Steve said...

Also, some directories might be hidden from view. If you plug in your old HD that had those pictures hidden in the old profile, you should, technically, be able to access them by either searching them or browsing the "hidden path"...

Which OS were you running on the 500?

Also, since I started using portable HD, it made my backups much easier (but that's for later).

 

[njpaddy]

I have HD to USB cables to connect old drives externally thru USB. The computer then reads the old drive like an external drive and I can copy back and forth without having to install the drive. Of course it the files are damaged, that's another story.

 

[SiBurning]

Do yourself a favor. After you install the new OS to the new drive, and before you install anything from the old drives, run a full virus & spyware scan on all of the drives... Just in case.

 

[Phog Allen]

Okay guys, thanks for the help. Let me explain things a bit more clearly. I have both drives installed in the Dell. The newer Seagate 500 boot drive and the WD500 which used to be the prior boot drive. When I go to My Computer>Drive E; I can see most things on the drive. It is only the old profile 'Todd' I cannot seem to access. If I understand what some of you are suggesting, remove the newer boot drive, restart boot to the WD 500 (old boot drive) and then access what I can there and try to make another folder and copy everything to it? Should I place said folder in the root drive C:? Sorry to sound so dumb but this is really a pain in the arse. The more I fiddle with it the more I think the registry in the WD is badly broken and causing major issues. Could easily be a virus to. If I have both drives installed can I instruct Avira free edition to scan only the WD installed as a secondary drive or will it see the OS, boot sector, Avira(I use it on most everything), etc?

As for using Linux, I am game to try it but how do I proceed? Should I make a bootable usb stick drive and boot from it? Then what? If the information is there it will be near 30Gb. How do I copy and move it? Thanks again lads.

BTW, the Dell only has two sata channels so installing all three drives is out. Here is how BIOS is configured now. Sata channel 0 is the Seagate 500 and channel 1 is the WD. Currently the machine boots properly to the Seagate and shows the WD as an additional drive at letter E.

Cheers, Todd

 

[Phog Allen]

Also, the question was asked as to which OS was on the old drive. All the drives have a Dell OEM XP Pro with Media Centre. I originally replaced the old 160 because I can tell from the noises it is not long for this world. The WD 500 was its replacement till it went nuts and got corrupted or some such malady. The Seagate was an attempt to gain a stable boot drive, which it is, so I could then install the old boot drive as storage and copy what I needed from it. Then my plan was to use something like Piriform's Drive Wiper to blast it clean and use it for media storage.

Cheers, Todd

 

[_JP_]

Never use cut to move files around. When you cut, the data is erased from the drive as it is copied onto the RAM. Once you reboot the computer, those files are dumped out of the RAM, forever lost. use the Move or Copy options for transferring files.

As you have learned the hard way, always have backup of data that you don't want use. It's a life saver.

Your problem with accessing that old drive now is not a registry issue. It is not the boot drive, so the old Registry in the copy of Windows that is on it is not being used. So let's start diagnosing the old drive.

Did you install the drive tools for Western Digital or Seagate? Run those. If not, then do the following.

Open up the Command Prompt window.
Key in cd/x (x being the current drive letter for the old drive.)
Key in chkdsk/r This will start the Check Disk process and allow it to fix any errors it can.

Once it has started running, go polish your razors because it's going to take quite a while. When it is finished, it'll give you a status report. Expect some errors to be reported. Then try accessing those files on that drive.

 

[SiBurning]

Leave the new drive as the boot drive and install the others one at a time as secondary drives so you can copy stuff from them. If you want to access the old profile, log in as administrator so you have permission to access it.

Copy the files somewhere (maybe to the new drive?) then, still logged in as administrator, change the permissions on the new folder to "Everyone" or "Authenticated Users" or "Users" or "All" or whatever, making sure to check the box that says to recurse into the folders.

It's highly unlikely, but you might need to change the permissions on the old profile folder before you can access them, even logged in as administrator--sometimes things get messed up like that when you do... certain very unlikely things. Administrators don't necessarily have rights to view things, but they do always have rights to change permissions.

 

[Phog Allen]

Thanks lads. And yeah, using "cut" was never an option. I am not even sure I did so but what other real option could it be? So yeah, maybe too late now but I will most assuredly double check the options next time.

And I will try the log in as admin angle as well. I was happy that many of the things I wanted to copy are still knocking about on the old 160. Interestingly I can access about anything I want on that drive with ease. Strange. Anyway, thanks again for all the help and I will post back what I discover.

Cheers, Todd