Help, hard drive woes, newbie

D

druss

n00b
Joined
Dec 18, 2006
Messages
6
Have had problems with a year old laptop and the ram modules flaking out, use the computer heavily for work so took out the hard drive (80gb ata fujitsu ntfs) to put in an older laptop`(30gb ide fat 32).

Thought it might work but crashed windows xp on boot. bought an external enclosure for the drive as another method of getting to files but file system looks garbage, have now worked out that the computer is seeing at as a 30gb fat32 formatted hard drive.

Is this the reason why it cant read the files and the names of files and folders garbage? is there a way to change this back to ntfs without losing the all important data?

your help would be very much appreciated as im knackered without the work data.

thanks
 
Let me see if I get you:
You have an 80GB HDD (NTFS) that is the "primary" hdd in your laptop. It contains your OS (WinXP) and also some important word data that is not (yet) backed up. Your RAM gave you trouble, so you moved the HDD to an older Laptop. As expected, Windows does not boot up in this different system.

After some more tinkering, your old Laptop is booting, using the 30GB drive, but cannot access the NTFS partition on your externally connected 80GB drive. The external 80GB drive appears as a 30 GB partition.

Did I follow you correctly this far? If so, what OS is the laptop running?
 
The old laptop is running windows xp and yup the original 30gb is now the master and boots fine, the now external`drive is the 80gb fujitsu shows up in my computer as

pÄ-çà!<&#9562;]ç (H:)

I can access the drive and see a list of files and folders but they all have scrambled names like that above and cant access or read them beyond the explorer list.

if i check properties has it listed as fat 32 and 30gb drive
 
How important is that data? Depending on that there are quite a few options you can try.

I would give GetDataBack a try and see what it says.
 
Shot in the dark, here... is there a unicode or other language setting difference between the two machines?
 
It is recognising all the files, which is great news. it came up with the full list of files but selected to save and program froze.

urgh
 
I had for some reason it was freezing when browsing for the external storage location to back up to, sorted now and backed up.


I presume now backed up i need to format the hard drive as ntfs, and then copy the data back.

Willthe drive be recognisable to the laptop's operating system or will i need to do something else?

big THANKYOU for all your help
 
I am not 100% certain how GDB works, but I doubt that copying it back will give you a working WinXP install.

Before you do anything else, I highly recommend that you check the integrity of your now backed up data to verify that you have indeed recovered what you wanted to

If you are certain that your problem was caused by RAM and you want to reuse the HDD, I would format it and reinstall windows from the original media. Note that you ought to have the HDD installed in the work laptop at this point.

After you are done installing your programs etc. you can copy the data that you need from the external drive, since you have previously verified its integrity.

Now you can live happily ever after, since you'll be sure to back up more frequently :)
 
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