Member Avatar for WyldStallyn

My computer's Windows XP OS recently "crashed" so I put in a new hard drive with Windows ME OS. I've installed everything with the replacement hard drive, but for some reason I can't get it to recognize my other hard drives that have information written from the XP OS. The only way I have found to get my old hard drives to work is to reformat them, but that requires deleteing the information on the drives- something I absolutely cannot do. Is there any way I can get these to work with the new OS?
The 2 extra hard drives are a 160GB Western Digital
and a 120GB Maxor (formerly my boot-up drive)

Help with this is greatly appreciated!

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— was right to point at an OS/driver mismatch. Below are safe, practical ways to recover your files from the old drives without reformatting, plus a few troubleshooting checks to try first.

Try a Linux live USB/CD (no install). Download a recent desktop ISO (for example Ubuntu Desktop), write it to a USB stick or CD with a tool like balenaEtcher, boot the PC from that media and choose the “Try” option. Once running you can mount the internal disks and copy files off to an external USB drive or network share. This avoids touching the installed OS and is the quickest, low-risk extraction method.

If you prefer Windows tools, connect each old drive to a different computer that already runs a more recent Windows release (or use a USB-to-IDE/SATA adapter). Before powering up, check physical jumpers on older IDE drives and confirm the BIOS/UEFI detects the full drive capacity. Do not accept any “initialize/format” prompts from Windows — cancel them and copy files instead.

If partitions look damaged or files are missing, boot recovery media and use utilities such as TestDisk/PhotoRec to scan and extract files (see TestDisk/PhotoRec). For drives with read errors, make a sector-by-sector image first (for example with ddrescue) and work from the image so you avoid further wear to the original disk.

Final cautions: never format when prompted; always copy data off first; keep a verified backup before attempting repairs; and consider installing an OS on the new drive that natively supports the old drive’s filesystem if you need continued, direct access.

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Member Avatar for Catweazle

The other drives are not being recognised because they will be formatted as NTFS partitions, rather than as FAT32 partitions which Windows Me uses. The Windows 9x versions do not have the capability to use NTFS partitions.

To enable them to be used without formatting, you will need to install a 3rd party software utility which adds that capability to your version of Windows. There are free utilities available which allow Windows Me to READ an NTFS partition, but to get full read/write capability you will have to pay for the software, I'm afraid.

Here's the most widely used one:

http://www.purenetworking.net/Products/NTFSfor98/NTFSfor98.htm

Member Avatar for WyldStallyn

Thanks! It works now!

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