Adding old Hard Drive

My old Gateway's motherboard crashed and I am not able to run the computer
any more. The Gateway was running Windows XP.
I purchased a new Compaq which came with Windows Vista. I added the old hard
drive to the new computer and while Vista sees the old hard drive (which I
renamed G) and also sees a folder structure on the drive, it does not see any
of the files in those folders. The drive is a 250 Gig drive and Vista says it
is Healthy, Partitioned, but only contains 25 gig.
I tried to save a document to the new drive and Vista would not let me save
it to the old, newly added drive.
I want to transfer documents, pictures, and music directly to new hard drive
in new computer which is running Vista.
HOW?????

Hopefully you are seeing just the first partition on the old drive, this may
be a 'restore' partition (from its size) and you need to assign a letter to
the 'real' partition.

Control Panel
System and Maintenance
under administrative tools (near bottom)
create and format hard disk partition

this should show you the configuration of the partitions hopefully you will
see a large partition without any drive letter, assign it a drive letter.

BTW you may have to 'take possession' of the files in order to see them if
they were password protected in your old XP machine.

Michael;

"Boulderperson" <Boulderperson@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:68040D29-6901-4925-B7B7-8DF8017BB19C@microsoft.com...
> My old Gateway's motherboard crashed and I am not able to run the computer
> any more. The Gateway was running Windows XP.
> I purchased a new Compaq which came with Windows Vista. I added the old
> hard
> drive to the new computer and while Vista sees the old hard drive (which I
> renamed G) and also sees a folder structure on the drive, it does not see
> any
> of the files in those folders. The drive is a 250 Gig drive and Vista says
> it
> is Healthy, Partitioned, but only contains 25 gig.
> I tried to save a document to the new drive and Vista would not let me
> save
> it to the old, newly added drive.
> I want to transfer documents, pictures, and music directly to new hard
> drive
> in new computer which is running Vista.
> HOW?????

Boulderperson wrote:
> My old Gateway's motherboard crashed and I am not able to run the computer
> any more. The Gateway was running Windows XP.
> I purchased a new Compaq which came with Windows Vista. I added the old hard
> drive to the new computer and while Vista sees the old hard drive (which I
> renamed G) and also sees a folder structure on the drive, it does not see any
> of the files in those folders. The drive is a 250 Gig drive and Vista says it
> is Healthy, Partitioned, but only contains 25 gig...

Does your BIOS say anything about the hard drives during bootup? I've
heard that Compaq does things a bit differently from most other mobo
manufacturers -- but I don't have any hard data. If Vista gets its info
from the BIOS (I dunno if it does) then the BIOS settings may be the way
to fix the problem.

"Don" <don195702@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:O26pWRzYHHA.4872@TK2MSFTNGP03.phx.gbl...
> Boulderperson wrote:
>> My old Gateway's motherboard crashed and I am not able to run the
>> computer
>> any more. The Gateway was running Windows XP.
>> I purchased a new Compaq which came with Windows Vista. I added the old
>> hard
>> drive to the new computer and while Vista sees the old hard drive (which
>> I
>> renamed G) and also sees a folder structure on the drive, it does not see
>> any
>> of the files in those folders. The drive is a 250 Gig drive and Vista
>> says it
>> is Healthy, Partitioned, but only contains 25 gig...
>
> Does your BIOS say anything about the hard drives during bootup? I've
> heard that Compaq does things a bit differently from most other mobo
> manufacturers -- but I don't have any hard data. If Vista gets its info
> from the BIOS (I dunno if it does) then the BIOS settings may be the way
> to fix the problem.

Maybe the old drive's jumper(s) have it still configured as a master drive
and not a slave drive and you've installed it as a slave drive ? Just
guessing here...but maybe that will make a difference.
Bob