my old hard drive

[pheeph]

I was trying to extract data from my old hard drive that used to be from my old Dell Dimension 4600 (The PC's now used as a Vista media center). This old pc still has XP Home Edition installed in it, and I'm just trying to get to the data. After installation, I only got the free space and nothing from the used space (the drive is blank when accessing it through "My Computer"). Do I have to use a USB hard drive enclosure to get that data out?

 

[Elvandil]

You should be able to get it by any method at all if it is still there. How does the drive appear in Disk Management?

Right-click Computer > Manage > Disk Management.

 

[pheeph]

silly me... I put the wrong hard drive in there... It's actually the 30 GB instead of the 80 GB I was supposed to put in. But now I got a bigger problem. Aside from the fact that it's an IDE Hard drive (I have an SATA hard drive in there as well), it boots to my old XP that asks for activation instead of the XP Pro I currently use.

 

[crjdriver]

That is a common problem when you mix ide and sata drives. Many boards will default to an ide drive as the boot device. Simply enter the bios and set the correct hd as the boot hd. Save settings and restart the system; it should then boot the "correct" xp install.