No Data On Existing Hard Drives After Windows 7 Installation?
Dec 26, 2011
I have a system with three hard disks on them. The Primary one has the OS and some programs. Secondary one has programs and data (like pictures and such). Third one has data and backup data.I recently formatted the Primary drive which had Windows Vista on it, and did a full install of Windows 7 Pro.After the install, the Secondary and Tertiary disks showed up in disk management; I just had to assign drive letters to them.The issue: I can see the existing Secondary and Tertiary disks in windows explorer. I can go into properties on each hard disk and see that there is used disk space on them (so the data is still there). But Windows Explorer shows both hard disks as empty. I can't actually see any of the data. What can I do to fix this...obviously without formatting the disks and losing the existing data on there? Is this perhaps a driver issue?
My Windows 7 Pro x64 has twice had to be completely reinstalled after serious faults.Each time before the crash Virtual XP had been installed and had created its own VHD.Both VHDs have been preserved, but the Virtual machine(s) have apparently isappeared. On each Windows 7 reinstallation, the important folders from the previous version were saved in a Windows.Old folder. I now want to reinstall VirtualXP and choose one of the old VHDs rather than create yet another one. What is the easiest and fastest way to do that?
Have a Windows 7 computer with two 500Gb data drives (just files, no OS) that I would like to "merge" into a new 2Tb drive but keep everything on one partition. I know I can clone the drives onto two separate partitions of my new drive, and then do a partition merge and resize to fill up all the free space. Or I can turn on view hidden and system files and simply drag & drop the contents of both drives to my new one.
I'm having issues with transferring data between hard drives in my system. I have 3 500 GB drives in my system connected via esata. Just a few minutes ago I tried transferring 24.1 GB from one hard drive to another and it took forever I was getting under 10 MB per second. Once I got everything transferred I created a folder in the drive I moved everything to and then moved the same 24.1 GB plus another folder that was 10 GB and everything transferred into the folder instant, so fast I couldn't every look to see how long it was taking cause it was there the minutes I moved the folders to the new folder. Why did it take so long transferring that same data from one hard drive to another one in my system?? I should be getting a whole lot more than 10 MB per second.
I have always backed my personal hard drives using images for easy restoration
However i now have 2 PCs that need backup performed and they just want the data so an image is not necessary thus i only want the important data ie; documents and settings important files no junk such as updates or temp files
I would prefer to remove the hard drives and plug it into another pc to perform the backup instead of doing the back up from the actual machine
I am installing windows 7. but the installation cd won't recognized the hard drives but my bios does. i went to the website and looked up drivers for the wd2500s but they don't have them. they said that they use the software in windows to work. so is there any way to get the drives to work? i have three set up on raid 0
I have two hard drives, one is SATA 500gb and the other is IDE 150gb. I had Windows 7 on the SATA and an old Ubuntu on the IDE hard drive. I hardly ever used Ubuntu and got tired of GRUB coming up every time I booted asking which OS I want so I decided to uninstall it. I wanted to go ahead and reformat the drive so I used an old Windows XP cd I have to reformat the 150g IDE drive. It wouldn't let me just reformat without installing XP so I went ahead and did that.So now whenever I turn on the PC it automatically boots into Windows XP. In XP I can see both drives, my 500gb with all my files and Windows 7 and the 150gb with just XP on it. In my BIOS the SATA 500gb is set as the main hdd, and is set as #1 in the boot priority (IDE hdd is not anywhere in boot priority). When I bring up the boot list and choose the SATA HDD it just brings up a BIOS flasher, no Windows 7.
I have a 1TB drive I want to install windows on. There is no existing windows installation on the drive, only music, movies, and other files and documents. Is it OK to install windows without formatting this drive? I don't have anything to back up all they data.
I've been having some issues with a computer that belongs to CEO of the company I work for. It was built by his son in law and that son in law doesn't really have time to work on it anymore so fortunately "end of sarcasm" that responsibility falls on me.Computer was running great until about two or three months ago where after shutting it down for the night and turning it back on in the morning would cause the computer to reboot three times after going through POST and during 4th time he was able to boot into OS (WIN7 64bit). I updated his bios and that seemed to fix the problem, BUT the computer was set in a Raid 1, but for some reason it is no longer set up that way. I see both HDD as separate HDD in "My Computer" C: & D:, both are 600GB with about 400GB of space free. How can I return them into their raid 1 configuration? MOBO is GA-X58A-UD7 Rev 2, Intel Core i7 970 cpu with 12GB DDR3 RAM Total. He has about $10,000 worth of programs on it (Electrical & Mechanical Engineer) and it would take me weeks if I had to start from scratch.
I'm trying to move my Windows 7 to a bigger and better hard drive.
My original idea was to create a system image and restore it to a different hard drive with windows repair (after all, this is what you would do after a hard disk failure). However, it only allowed me to restore the image to the original hard drive.
I'm about to do a destructive install to Win 7 64bit, to upgrade my existing Win 7 32bit installation. I already have a partition in my hard disk ( K: ) where existing User profiles/data are stored. Luckily there is only my profile and one for a guest user. I've read through some of the Tutorials on this site on how to create new users on a different drive/partition at the point of installing Win 7, and I've read how to change the User Folder Name of a profile.The fear I have is that the newname user in the 64bit will obliterate the oldname at the point of being used for the first time.
Is it possible to merge C and D drives without deleting the data or having to format them. If it's possible, then how to do this in Windows 7? Notice both drives are almost full of data (not many games or programs).
I am trying to moved everything---program files as well as data files---from one laptop to another. The source is XP, the destination Windows 7 Home Premium 64. From what (little) I understand, most imaging programs clone everything, including the XP register and boot drive. But how can you then boot the Windows 7 machine to run the programs that were originally instaled in XP?I know I can just drag over the data files and re-install all the software, but I am not sure I will live long enough to complete that task.
I am planning to replace my motherboard and memory on my Win 7 Home premium 64b. I've been updating MBs for 25 years and now I am getting conflicting answers regarding booting existing hard drive on new MB. My present Win 7 installation was installed on my present MB. Before I have always been able to use an existing hard drive and OS on a new MB.Now when I asked Gigabyte if a reinstall would be required they said no, but the registry may be full of unneeded drivers etc which would affect performance. This seems a solvable issue using registry cleaners and editors.But I am also getting opinions that Win 7 will not boot up on a new MB and reinstall OS would be required. Considering the number of programs, some on disks others from downloads. activation keys etc, this is a major problem.
I recently built a new computer that has an ssd intended for the os, the problem is it isnt big eneugh for all the program files, and user data. I want to move that part of the operating system over to the hard drive but have no idea how to go about it.
External backup for 2 Windows 7 home computers.Prices are currently at a premium for a 2T 2 1/2" USB 3x external backup drive. I will retire the XP machine soon that is being replaced by the new Windows 7 machine. The XP machine has 2 drives--one of which is slower than molasses and you can hear the thing churning away when nothing should be going on (indexing off).I've never had much luck with diagnostic software--in particular PC Doctor when it was shipped with Lenovo systems.Is there, in particular, hard drive diagnostic software that really can diagnose a problematic drive?
after installation of linux mint 7 gloria when i tried to perfoam a new installation windows 7 cant't load drives as well as other operating system i tried
make a dualboot comp by adding windows XP to a new partition. I created the new partition with 20gb. (From the 500 of my actual harddrive)But before I actually installed on that, I got distracted with a second harddrive that my dad got(for no reason). It had a full copy of Windows XP backed up on it from another computer, so I figured I would just use that for the dualboot. I plugged it in (wired the same way as my old harddrive, but different data slot), restarted, checked the harddrive in explorer - all the data was there / reading correctly / etc, and I used 'easyBCD' to add the new harddrive to the boot list.(Which, of course, crashes if I try to start it. I just wanted to see what it would do). For a reason I can't remember, I unplugged the second harddrive for a bit, started the computer on accident (I don't know if anything loaded before I shut it off), and then when I plugged it back in.Windows 7 would not launch. It goes to a DOS-like window, except it's just a flashing _ and it never does anything even after a few minutes. XP didn't work still.. so I decided to reinstall XP (as I couldn't tell which harddrive was which on the list, I unplugged the main harddrive while installing onto the new).. and when I did this.. it formatted and installed fully... then restarted.. then restarted.. and restarted.. and just kept restarting, never showing any thing past the manufacturer logo/BIOS load-button-message-thing. So, I then try to use my 3-disk Windows7Recovery disk(burned myself with a program apparently included by the manufacturer.) It installed fully, appearing to work.. but when I launched it, it said "Invalid Partition Table" and wouldn't boot past that. When I insert my driver installer disk, it gives me a basic DOS window thing. dir A: shows the files in the disk. dir B: for some reason shows the same. C: says "Error reading from drive C: DOS area: general failure". All other letter:'s just say "invalid drive". (I'm doing this with both harddrives in.) I attempted connecting the harddrives to an old computer, but it gave an error for both. (It detected the harddrives, but said it had an error reading from it. Windows Explorer asked me to format it... {i'm willing to format one of the drives if anybody thinks it will help, but the old harddrive has data I'd prefer not to lose.} ) Looking on google, I saw several problems that all have similar problems (less overdescripptive than I am though) but none of the fixes suggested worked for me. Also - as I have two different with different errors, I only need to make one of them work.)Also - my other available computer has a CD burner / floppy drive if either are required. I also have several USB's. The computer can boot from USB's and CD's (tested), and I could easily take the floppy thingy and connect it to the computer.also - this computer is probably still under warranty unless unscrewing the hard drive voids it. .. does that count as modification of the computer?
I use an WD external hard drive (1TB) for additional storage and it was working fine with no issues. The small USB connector broke off the board yesterday and I purchased a new enclosure and installed it. Now my computer does not recognize it as a storage device. I have all the data still on the HD and really do not want to loose it. I tried adding a letter for the drive, but it does not show up to change the letter of the drive.
My system crashed and i get the blue dead screen. Now i want to install windows 7 (legal) from usb. When i get to the 'where do you want to install windows?' it gives me the following message: No drives were found. Click Load Driver to provide a mass storage driver for installation.I tried to go to my bios and change some things i read from other treads, but it didn't work out for me. I just don't know where in the bios i can change things, maybe my bios is different than others.This is my laptop: MSI GX700 Intel Core 2 Duo T7500-processor @ 2,2 GHz This is what my BIOS tells me:
MAIN Market name: GX700 Model Name: MS-1719x Primary IDE Master [hard disk] Secondary IDE Master [ATAPI CDROM] System Information
Its my own fault, I was doing this in a daze. Having installed the new SSD and gone into Windows 7 setup, I thought id created a new partition on the drive for Windows to go on. Anyways, Windows was saying there was some sort of problem, so I thought, ok , rinse & repeat - and so I hit delete...Now nothing is showing up in the drive list. It is visible in bios - and I've since used the OCZ boot disk and did a secure wipe. Still nothing. So I used a PartitionWizard boot disc, and created a brand new NTFS system partition. Still nothing. Do I need some drivers or something? Setup does say I could use a disk to find some...
My WIn 7 as failed and I had to re install it, I thought that I was safe with my server backup, but some file where note saved.I did try with some software like Recuva, R_Studio, Mareew Company but nothing came out
I have tried these discs on two computers (they're Sony DVD-RW's) and brand new, I open them and put them in the disc tray, I press "burn" and it either pretends to write on one computer and then says error after 3minutes (no data is recorded) or it doesn't detect the disc it keeps saying "Please insert a Disc"? I've tried literally everything and I doubt it could be the disc's because they're brand new. The windows fix it centre program identifies an issue but cannot fix it?
I'm currently running a primary disk for my system drive on windows 7, with two other 1tb drives for saving data set to raid1(Mirror each other ). However my primary disk has problems and need to be upgraded.Would I need to reformat the two mirror data drives before i do the upgrade in order to ensure the raid 1 is working
I just installed Windows 7 build 7068. 64bit.I have an Asus P5WD2E-Premium mobo, and 5 Western Digital Hard drives of various sizes, all SATA.Windows recognizes only 2 of the drives, the c drive of course, and only 1 of two WD 400gig hds, which are identical.I know this may be a mobo issue, but, wasn't sure about Windows 7.
Recently, my ancient desktop died on me. I had some stuff stored on the main C drive (40 GB) and some on an external 1 TB drive. I put the 40 GB HD in the external module to upload it to a laptop with a 360 GB HD. I would then like to transfer that 40 GB to the 1 TB drive. When I plug in the external with the 40 GB, it appears that the Windows 7 machine does not read it or pick it up. It recognizes it as an external device, but not as a drive.
I have a HP Pavilion dv9800. It came with Vista and one 250 GB HDD. I added a second internal 250 GB SATA HDD. I got the second drive formatted and so it showed as a second drive where the HHDs are displayed. I didn't have any Vista OS software on it (to my knowledge, as far as I could see) but I could use the drive for extra storage, etc.I went to add Windows 7 with an install disk. I would like to simply replace Vista with Windows 7 and have the second HDD usable as extra space, so it would serve the same function as it has with Vista. However, when I used the install disk it asked me which drive I wished to install Windows 7 on. I installed it on on the second HDD only, so now I'm running Vista on the C: drive (and it's on D: Recovery too) and Windows 7 on the drive added second. can I replace Vista on C: (and D) and then use the other added HDD for storage, etc? In other words, I want only Windows 7 OS on this machine, but want to be able to use both drives, with a similar configuration as I had with Vista.
