Question Getting data off old hard drive

Mar 15, 2019
4
0
10
Good morning,

My old laptop crapped out this weekend, so I got a new one, found a SATA-USB cable to help move things over, except when the hard drive is plugged in like this its only showing what was on...D drive, I think, in my old one? I need to get my files and such off of the old C drive.

I opened the disk management window and poked it a bit, but a) the mark partition as active was greyed out, b) if it WAS available, would that have made the files available or restarted my laptop as if it were the old one?

I saw suggestions about using the command line to make it active and have similar concerns--I am, admittedly, a bit out of my depth and afraid of messing something up here. Help, please?
 
Mar 15, 2019
4
0
10
This is true! But I have a terrible memory and bought that one--oh, geez, only a year ago? I'm...usually better at not murdering my laptops than that.
But, yes, here we are:
2018 Lenovo Legion Y520 15.6" FHD IPS Gaming Laptop Computer, Intel Quad-Core i7-7700HQ up to 3.80GHz, 16GB DDR4, 256GB SSD+2TB HDD, 4GB NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050Ti Graphics, 802.11ac, HDMI, Win 10
...So then...does that mean the info I need is...probably not on the drive I took out? Blast.
 
This is true! But I have a terrible memory and bought that one--oh, geez, only a year ago? I'm...usually better at not murdering my laptops than that.
But, yes, here we are:
2018 Lenovo Legion Y520 15.6" FHD IPS Gaming Laptop Computer, Intel Quad-Core i7-7700HQ up to 3.80GHz, 16GB DDR4, 256GB SSD+2TB HDD, 4GB NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050Ti Graphics, 802.11ac, HDMI, Win 10
...So then...does that mean the info I need is...probably not on the drive I took out? Blast.

You have two drives, the SSD and the secondary 2tb drive. Disk you removed is that second one.
Also what are you trying to move over? You can copy your personal files but not the installed programs without re-installing them. You can move things like Steam setup folder though, and maybe some other things like Origin maybe. Will need to check on their support for exact steps to do that.
 

USAFRet

Titan
Moderator
Good morning,

My old laptop crapped out this weekend, so I got a new one, found a SATA-USB cable to help move things over, except when the hard drive is plugged in like this its only showing what was on...D drive, I think, in my old one? I need to get my files and such off of the old C drive.

I opened the disk management window and poked it a bit, but a) the mark partition as active was greyed out, b) if it WAS available, would that have made the files available or restarted my laptop as if it were the old one?

I saw suggestions about using the command line to make it active and have similar concerns--I am, admittedly, a bit out of my depth and afraid of messing something up here. Help, please?

If your old drive is connected externally to a different PC or laptop, it WILL be a different drive letter. It appears to be D in this case.
It will not be the "C" drive.