Adding a drive that has windows 7 to xp machine.

[Dannysutton]

Hello, I have a computer where I think the motherboard has died, I want to get some stuff off my hard drive, some of its backed up, just not recent files. This hard drive was running windows 7.
I have another pc that is running windows Xp, it has a spare Sata slot. Can I plug in my hard drive for it to appear on the Xp machine as a second drive to retrieve my files? Even though it was running windows 7?
Regards, Dan.

 

[RealBeast]

Yes, you should be able to just plug it into a sata data port and power connector and then start up the machine and copy the data off the drive.

 

[phil22]

Yes you can, but be aware of this:

If the Windows 7 is installed on an NTFS partition (the default), your Windows XP must also be installed on an NTFS partition (not FAT32). Otherwise Windows XP will be unable to "see" any data on the Windows 7 drive.

Additionally, if some of the data you want to rescue is in any of the user account folders (eg My Documents, My Pictures etc.) you will need to "take ownership" of those folders to get access to them. See this for taking ownership in XP: http://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/windows/xp/all/proddocs/en-us/acl_take_ownership.mspx?mfr=true