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General discussion

New computer not recognize laptop's internal drive

Jul 4, 2005 5:37AM PDT

I had a Gateway laptop with a 20GB internal drive that contained a good bit of data. The laptop bit the dust (motherboard issue), so I removed the hard drive from the laptop, and now have it in an external (USB 2) enclosure.

When I jack the old drive into the USB 2 port on my desktop, it recognizes that the drive is attached. Everything looks good in Device Manager. As seems to be everyone's problem, it does not show up in My Computer.

The volume is showing as Disk 5 under Disk Management, layout is partition, type is basic, file system is NTFS (same as the root drive), and the status shows Healthy (Active). It is not assigned a drive letter, and the only activity available to me is to delete the partition. I am trying to access the drive to recover the data, so I'd like to avoid reformatting (for obvious reasons).

The desktop is a VAOI RB42G running XP with Media Center. The laptop was running Win2k.

Any insight would be appreciated.

Discussion is locked

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Does KNOPPIX see it?
Jul 4, 2005 7:45AM PDT

I boot a KNOPPIX (please use google) to see what it thinks.

Bob

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Almost there
Jul 6, 2005 1:41PM PDT

Thanks, Bob.

I am booting KNOPPIX off of a DVD, and it does in fact see the drive and can access the data. Forgive me fo not being a Linux user, but I cannot transfer the data between drives. I believe it because I do not have write privileges. I've tried changing up permissions, but I do not know the root password. Are you aware of a default?

Thanks for the help to date.

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Still Trying
Jul 6, 2005 2:28PM PDT

I hunted down the root password issue on my own and can log in under it, but I still don't seem to have rights to create folders on any drive or transfer the data. I'm booting off of the DVD burner drive, so that doesn't work as an option either. Further thoughts?

Thanks,

Shawn

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I had to add either...
Jul 6, 2005 9:24PM PDT

An USB memory key, USB hard disk in FAT32 format or USB CDRW drive or go across a network to backup in that situation.

The KNOPPIX confirms the files are still there.

Can I ask if you partitioned it with Partition Magic? It seems to be a source of this issue.

Bob