Getting Old Files to New Computer

[Writers Coin]

So I had an old Dell Inspiron 5100 whose power supply crapped out on me. I was about to buy a new machine anyway, so I did. But now I want to get all the old files off of my laptop, which no longer powers up.

So I bought this: a Adaptec IDE to USB 2.0 Adapter.

So I took the hard drive out of the laptop and hooked it up to this thing, and then hooked up the USB to my new, Vista powered machine.

No problems. The computer recognizes the drive, the size of the drive, and all the folders and files show up.

But I can't see all the files. My music, my pictures, all that stuff isn't visible to me. I try to go into the Documents folder to find my files. But I don't see them. I try running a search on the whole drive to find files I know are on there.

But they aren't found. Am I missing a step here? I tried finding the answer online and saw something about "taking ownership" of the drive and creating a new partition, but I wasn't sure if that was what I was looking for.

Can someone help me out?

 

[Blain]

Did you copy the folders over to the working machine, then look for files in them?

 

[Pantlegz]

maybe make sure windows explorer is showing hidden files? what was the old OS?

 

[Writers Coin]

Haven't tried copying folders to the new machine, would that make a difference? The old OS was XP and the new one is Vista.

And I haven't figured out how to show hidden files on Vista.

Thanks for the suggestions, I hope to get this fixed soon

 

[Eureka]

Make sure you're in the right documents folder. Windows has multiple documents folder, including a "default" one as well as "yours". It should live in X:\Documents and Settings\<User Name>\My Documents. X: is the drive that you installed Windows on. Unless, of course, you installed a custom documents folder.

Make sure you're in the right partition, or that you have the right hard drive (it could happen).

If you want to set Vista to see hidden documents, go into Control Panel > Folder Options. Then select "show hidden files and folders". Also, to reenable the menu bar in folders, you can select "always show menus" while you're in there.

Note: You do NOT want to partition the drive at any time during this process. Doing so will destroy data on your hard drive, possibly to the point of being unrecoverable.

 

[Writers Coin]

Aha! Showing hidden files worked! Thanks everyone!

 

[WildHorse]

xcopy



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