Question about Hard Drive Compatibility

[drkgodz]

I have a secondary hard drive on my 32 bit Windows 7 system. However, I will be installing Windows 7 64-bit on the primary hard drive soon. My question is whether the secondary hard drive will still work on the 64-bit system or will I have to format it to work with 64-bit?

 

[sminlal]

Both 32- and 64-bit Windows use exactly the same NTFS file system. Your drive will work perfectly well after your reinstallation.

The only issue would be if any of your files or folders are protected so that they can only be accessed by a specific account (which is the default setting for your profile folder and any of its subfolders). In that case, you won't be able to access them from the 64-bit system without first taking ownership and then resetting the permissions on them.

This will be true even if you install the 64-bit system and create accounts with identical names, because every account uses an internal unique identifier for security purposes.

If you think this will be an issue, you can avoid the problem by changing the protections on the files and folders to "Everyone: full control" from your old 32-bit system before you upgrade to the 64-bit system.

 

[drkgodz]

Both 32- and 64-bit Windows use exactly the same NTFS file system. Your drive will work perfectly well after your reinstallation.

The only issue would be if any of your files or folders are protected so that they can only be accessed by a specific account (which is the default setting for your profile folder and any of its subfolders). In that case, you won't be able to access them from the 64-bit system without first taking ownership and then resetting the permissions on them.

This will be true even if you install the 64-bit system and create accounts with identical names, because every account uses an internal unique identifier for security purposes.

If you think this will be an issue, you can avoid the problem by changing the protections on the files and folders to "Everyone: full control" from your old 32-bit system before you upgrade to the 64-bit system.

I am not sure if any folders on my hard drive are protected. Is there any easy way to search for files that are protected?

 

[sminlal]

You need to right-click on a file or folder, select "properties", and click the "Security" tab. Inside the resulting dialogue box, clicking on one of the group or user names will show the access that it has in the lower pane.

What you're looking for is the groups that have "full control" access. If a generic group such as "Administrators" or "Users" (but not "SYSTEM") has full control access, then you'll be able to access it with the equivalent generic group on the 64-bit Windows system. But if the only names to have full control access are accounts for specific users (JoeSmith, for example) then the 64-bit system will be denied access.

Unless you've customized the access to subfolders, you can generally just need to do this for the top-level folder. The default is for all of the file and subfolders within to have the same permissions.

Don't sweat it too much if you're not sure. Even if you're denied access under 64-bit Windows you can still get around the problem by taking ownership of the files/folders and then changing their permissions.

 

[drkgodz]

Best answer selected by drkgodz.