Retrieving data from a windows 7 Hard drive with another PC?

[PCBliss]

I have been out of the computer repair world for a few years now, and have not dealt with fixing windows 7 PCs much at all. The wifes windows 7 laptop crashed, and I need to reinstall windows. I popped her hard drive out and hooked it up to my computer via an external USB adapter. I can see it find but her user account appears to be "hidden", I only see a "default" and "public" user account. I somewhat recall this being a security feature way back when when vista was coming out??

 

[Paperlantern]

Set your computer to show hidden files and folders. Or, hook the drive to a mac or a Linux machine, they ignore windows flags almost entirely.

 

[PCBliss]

Yes I have already set it to show hidden files and folders. I have found that most of her files are in a folder called F:\found.000 so I have been able to start transferring them to my computer. But if you try to browse to that folder specifically it doesn't come up. Something must have gotten corrupted?

 

[postmortemIA]

Yes I have already set it to show hidden files and folders. I have found that most of her files are in a folder called F:\found.000 so I have been able to start transferring them to my computer. But if you try to browse to that folder specifically it doesn't come up. Something must have gotten corrupted?

that folder is created when windows disk checks finds problems on NTFS partitions. it also means that error checking was performed.

 

[PCBliss]

Good to know. I have backed her files off the desktop but have not been able to find the "Documents" or "My documents" folder....

I am going to run a diagnostic on the hard drive, but I think the hard drive is ok.

My wife said she had recently tried to find and download a PC version of "angry birds" so I think that may have caused some problems...

 

[spikespiegal]

Try the 'Users' folder.