Reading old Win2K drive in Win7

[Jim_H_WY]

Hello, everyone.

I have a few HDDs that were in a Win2K computer and I would like to copy the data on them to a HDD in my Win7 machine.

I figured I'd just pop them into an external USB drive case and then simply copy the files to one of the internal drives in the Win7 machine.

When I try this, they show up in the drive manager as "dynamic" "offline". And nothing seems to activate them. In fact, if I try, the drive manager program freezes.

These drives may well have been set up to be dynamic drives in the old 2K machine. And perhaps this is the issue.

I read a post on here that said that the version of NTFS that 2K and XP used is not readable by a Win 7 machine. That sounds pretty scary.

Or is it that a dynamic drive cannot be read if it's in a USB external drive case?

If that's it, I could install them internally, temporarily, one at a time, on one of the IDE ports on the motherboard, just long enough to get the data copied. But it would obviously be easier to use a USB external drive case.

Thanks!

 

[ELMO_2006]

It seems that you cannot have an external Dynamic drive and as such you will need to mount the drives internally instead. The other day I attempted to create a dynamic drive via an external HDD dock via USB and Win7 spit out errors.

 

[Jim_H_WY]

That's good to know.

It won't be as easy and convenient to put these old drives inside the computer, one at a time, to get the data off of them, but if it's got to be done that way, then that's what I'll try. It's not a huge problem, just more crawling on the floor on my knees to do it.

I'm not sure why I set them up to be dynamic drives when they were inside the old W2K machine to begin with, but I must've thought it was a good idea at the time.

Thanks for that information!

 

[Jim_H_WY]

Update:

All of the drives I've tried now have worked just fine when plugged directly onto a PATA cable inside the computer. They show up in the disk management window as "foreign", and if you "import" them, they read just fine. So I've got my data copied.

So I suspect it was just a matter of dynamic drives not being supported via a USB-connected external drive case.

Thanks again.