Old hard drive, different old laptop, new problem.

wjl

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Mar 2, 2014
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Our household recently had two laptops go down, one with a bad motherboard, one with a bad hard drive. So, I McGuyver'd a solution by putting the good hard drive into the laptop with the good motherboard. The final product would boot but wouldn't load windows, even in safe mode, so I booted from the Windows 7 upgrade CD. Now I have a perfectly running version of Windows 7, but can't access any of the old files on the hard drive. I would accept that they are gone, except that My Computer tells me that my various drives and partitions have less than 100% space available, even though there are no accessible files there.

Can I still access those files?
 
Solution
The folder bad_kitty13 is referring to, is called windows.old. It's created when doing an upgrade to windows 7.

Even a fresh windows install won't show 100% of your hard drive as usable. How much does it show as capacity, and how much is being used?

You can use a free tool, such as Treesize, to see what is taking up the space on the hard drive.
The folder bad_kitty13 is referring to, is called windows.old. It's created when doing an upgrade to windows 7.

Even a fresh windows install won't show 100% of your hard drive as usable. How much does it show as capacity, and how much is being used?

You can use a free tool, such as Treesize, to see what is taking up the space on the hard drive.
 
Solution