Adding old OS drive to new system

[dazzazzad]

Have a win 8 system and want to add an old OS drive while maintaining the data on it as there's stuff on there I need. But when I go to disk management I don't see an option to import it as is. It see's the drive as unallocated and I have the option to create a new simple volume, but going down that path will result in a format right?

 

[howardb]

Do you know what file format the old OS drive is in?

 

[dazzazzad]

I'm 99% sure it was NTFS. Haven't used FAT on a HD in years and years.

 

[NoLogic001]

Your data is gone, sorry....

 

[Chris14]

can the data be accessed via an external hard drive enclosure? have you tried it on another OS PC, like XP?

 

[dazzazzad]

Don't really have another PC. Can maybe try the enclosure at work if you think that would help.

Really sucks, my place was robbed and they took my backup drives as well. Just hoping the image library folder of my machine before the one that got stolen would still be on this drive. Maybe I could just format and bring it into win 8 and then see what I can recover with Recuva or something like it.

Don't upload that muck to Facebook so 90% of my misty water coloured memories are potentially gone forever.

 

[sajunky]

Maybe I could just format and bring it into win 8 and then see what I can recover with Recuva or something like it.

Do you really want to format drive to recover data? I wonder...

If Win8 didn't assign drive letter (when you connected it the first time), data should be still intact. I don't think it is Windows compatibility problem, but you can always boot live CD, see if you can see partitions when booting older Windows live CD. If any problems, create image of this drive to the file and then work on the image to recover data. This is the safe way.

 

[dazzazzad]

I think I've got ubuntu live somewhere, that's a good idea.

 

[dazzazzad]

Solved thanks to a program called Testdisk.