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I have the good hard drive from an otherwise dead Vista laptop ( I'm looking at you, HP Pavilion DV6700!) connected to the USB port of a good windows 7 system.

To clarify, the drive from the old system is correctly mounted and readable from the new system with no problems via one of those cheap and effective adapters.

I want to give this user the w7 laptop with his files on there. Is there a good way to do this with a tool without having to figure out how to boot up that old Vista hard drive.

Windows Easy Transfer doesn't seem to have this use case of old computer's drive mounted in new computer. Is there another suitable tool? Or is manually copying them the best way?

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  • What to you mean by "connected to the USB port"? Surely if it's connected you have a USB-SATA interface, so it should mount as an external drive. Please clarify.
    – AFH
    Jun 18, 2014 at 9:38
  • See my edit answering your question and clarifying mine.
    – O. Jones
    Jun 18, 2014 at 10:16

3 Answers 3

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I would copy them manually. It will take a while, but you can just leave it going overnight, and you can selectively ignore files which are of no use (eg \Windows directory, swap file, etc). I wouldn't think there would be much of interest outside the \users and \ProgramData directories.

To be more thorough, I might be tempted to zip the whole drive so that the user can extract the files needed into the usual W7 working directories (usually in \Users), while retaining the zip for any forgotten files which are later needed.

You could partition the W7 drive and create an exact copy of the Vista partition, but this seems overkill to me. You could get much the same by creating an ISO from the drive, and you will get considerable space-saving by putting it in an NTFS compressed folder. There are many tools available for mounting ISO files and making their contents available to File Manager and other programs. This would be an alternative to zipping.

However you do it, it is a good idea to encourage the user not to change files in the drive copy, whatever form it takes. By copying to the normal W7 working folders the changes will be included in machine's back-up schedule without duplicating the whole drive, which can be in an excluded directory.

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what you need is a sata usb adaptor or a usb-docking station that accepts sata drive.the station plugs into usb port on your new laptop and can access data off the old drive.. I use one of these and are available from ebay.

http://www.ebay.com.au/itm/2-5-3-5-SATA-IDE-HDD-USB-Dual-Dock-Docking-Station-ESATA-OTB-HUB-Card-Reader-/131208303774?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_15&hash=item1e8c9fd49e

Remove the hdd from the old pc plug in the hdd to the docking station connect the usb cable to the new pc and copy data off it.

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  • Got that, thanks. I'm looking for a software tool to guide the process.
    – O. Jones
    Jun 18, 2014 at 10:17
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Software wise, you can use a live USB distribution of GNU/Linux and just dd the partitions onto the new (and probably blank) partition

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