After I decided the motherboard on my Win 10 computer mother board died I bought an enclosure for the internal hard drive to retrieve all pictures and other files. The only machine. I have currently working used windows 7. I cannot seem to access any files, the folders are all empty. Did I screw up somehow or is this a Win10/Win7 thing, or is there something else to do to get at them.
Thanks
With what filesystem is the drive set up? NTFS? ReFS? (Eg I believe Windows 7 lacks ReFS support.) Does anything at all show up, or is there an error that the disk is not formatted correctly? What if you boot using an Ubuntu Live (or whatever) USB drive- can it see any files?
Did you use Bitlocker by chance on the Win10 machine? If so your Win7 machine may not be able to decrypt it if it doesn’t have TPM 1.2 or later (not unusual on an older machine).
It says the file system in ntfs. Yes, it shows up as E:. I can navigate to where the pictures are but it says the files are empty. If I go to autorun and have it search for pictures it finds around 25K of them, but then says something or other is corrupted and it just stops.
Were the pictures in the “official” user folders like My Pictures, My Documents etc? If so, might be a user account permissions issue. You should be able to edit those to give yourself access if your account on the new PC is an admin.
What path is that exactly? What is the error message exactly?
If you’re following the OS recommendations, your pictures should be in E:/Users/(your username)/Pictures
Also I hate to bring up the possibility, but if your old motherboard died, it’s quite possible your pictures are corrupted. If it had, for example, faulty RAM or a bad disk controller, it could have written nonsense data to disk without realizing it was corrupting your files.
There’s nothing wrong with your idea of using a previously-internal HD as an external HD, and NTFS on Windows 10 is the same as NTFS on Windows 7.
And I was able to hook up my internal drive from my old Vista machine to my new Win10 machine and copy the files with no problems.
I had to use my old password, but that was an obvious problem. If you can find a program like the UNIX fsck you might try that to see if the disk is good.
BTW, I don’t understand what you mean by enclosure. I bought a cable that connected the disk popped right out of my laptop to the USB port of my new computer, and it worked
fine. Do you have desktop machines? I’ve removed drives from them, and I suspect the cable solution would work just as well.