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thanatos8285 · 05-11-2008, 02:53 PM

Ok so here's my situation. My desktop has a 40 GB hard drive and a 300 GB hard drive. The 40GB drive has XP installed on it, and nothing else important. The 300 GB drive has Vista (upgrade edition), and all my movies, pictures, documents, etc.

The 40 GB drive has completely failed, it won't even be recognized by the computer anymore, I can't even format it, it's dead and gone. The problem is, Vista won't load now. It seems my only option is to format and reinstall. BUT, I am absolutely unwilling to format it until I've backed up my pics, movies, documents, etc. I was told that a hard drive enclosure kit would solve my problems. Turn my 300 GB drive into an external drive, copy all my important data onto my laptop, start from scratch. I was told wrong.

I bought one and tried this, but the only option the laptop would give me was formatting. I couldn't view any of the data on the drive. When I explained what happened, I was told that it was because it was a Vista drive, and an XP laptop, and that there was a special software which would allow my laptop to recognize the data on the Vista drive, and get the data out. Does such a software actually exist? If not, what are my options?

05-11-2008, 02:53 PM	#1 (permalink)
thanatos8285 Registered User Join Date: May 2008 Posts: 14 OS: Windows XP, SP2 or SP3	Help! Need to back up data... Ok so here's my situation. My desktop has a 40 GB hard drive and a 300 GB hard drive. The 40GB drive has XP installed on it, and nothing else important. The 300 GB drive has Vista (upgrade edition), and all my movies, pictures, documents, etc. The 40 GB drive has completely failed, it won't even be recognized by the computer anymore, I can't even format it, it's dead and gone. The problem is, Vista won't load now. It seems my only option is to format and reinstall. BUT, I am absolutely unwilling to format it until I've backed up my pics, movies, documents, etc. I was told that a hard drive enclosure kit would solve my problems. Turn my 300 GB drive into an external drive, copy all my important data onto my laptop, start from scratch. I was told wrong. I bought one and tried this, but the only option the laptop would give me was formatting. I couldn't view any of the data on the drive. When I explained what happened, I was told that it was because it was a Vista drive, and an XP laptop, and that there was a special software which would allow my laptop to recognize the data on the Vista drive, and get the data out. Does such a software actually exist? If not, what are my options?