Plugging in a win7 formated drive and showing up in xp?

gizmo1990 · 28 Mar 2011 at 13:02

I've had a system fail on me and am in the process of upgrading.
I was running win7 64 bit on a ssd with a 1tb sata drive as my media storage.

While I wait to get the system back on its legs it's killing me wondering if the sata drive is ok. Now, I do have an old system running xp. I was wondering if I could put my sata drive in a old sata usb caddy and then plug it into my xp system and have it show up as a removable drive? That way I could at least check my information is ok and backup if needed.

What's stopping me is I'm terrified of messing up my sata drive. Is there any reason I should be worried about this happening? Thinking about it, would the drive even show up if it was formatted via win7 64?

What do you guys think? Is it worth trying? Would it even work?

Advice much appreciated.

Rainmaker · 28 Mar 2011 at 13:36

It'd probably show up, yes. But surely if the reason your Win7 rig isn't working is a hardware fault, you could just swap out the XP drive for the Win7 one altogether, and boot the drive as normal, in the other rig?

That way you can verify the drive and its contents directly. Oh, and make backups! It sounds from your frantic post as though you don't have any...

gizmo1990 · 28 Mar 2011 at 13:59

Thanks for the reply rainmaker.

I'd love to just swap them out but as I mentioned the os is on the ssd not the sata drive.

Tempted to do this then.. Anyone got any concerns before I do!? :confused:

div0 · 28 Mar 2011 at 14:27

You should be fine.

A few things to think about:

What is the drive formatted as now? If FAT32, or NTFS, then should be ok. If eFAT, then I don't think it'll show up.

How big is the drive? If over a certain size (1Tb or 2Tb, I forget which), then some drives offer to be formatted in a way which I don't think XP supports. I remember this vaguely from when I installed my WD 2Tb EARS drive.

In general you should be fine - and unless you do something stupid, like using XP to re-format the drive, then you should always be able to just plug it back into the Win7 machine.

Rainmaker · 28 Mar 2011 at 14:33

That'll teach me to post in a hurry lol. If all else fails, swap out the XP hdd for the data one, then boot from an Ubuntu live CD or USB. That will mount and read any format hdd easily.