I pulled my old backup harddrive from a nearly dead desktop recently. I want to plug it into my new Desktop using an External Enclosure since that old HDD is IDE and my new desktop is ATA, I don't think the new motherboard has a slot for IDE - right?

I set it all up and windows xp sees the F drive perfectly fine (Actually I Was surprised how easy that was) but it asks me to format it to proceed.

I don't want to do that since I still have files on that drive that I want to keep. I believe that drive is FAT32 and my current desktop C drive is NTSF.

According to this page: I should convert the old FAT32 drive to NTSF. http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/setup/tips/advanced/ntfs.mspx#2

I'm a little relucant to do this.

Anyone have any other suggestions or anyone have any experience with the recommended steps at the link I included above?

I'm not all that computer savy, so go easy on me.

My new machine is running Windows XP Home. My old machine was running Windows XP Pro. (I don't think that makes a difference - right?)

Check the motherboard. My MB has slots for both IDE and SATA harddrives. And you can also get an adapter to go from IDE to SATA (or vise versa).

You said that your new computer found your old drive, so can it read the data? If so, you can just copy it over to a file in your new HD, then format the old HD to NTSF and then copy it back (or just the parts you want to save) if you'd like. That is assuming you don't want to run the old operating system on the old hard drive.

It sees it as "drive F", but says that it's empty and in the slot that normally says "NTSF" or "FAT32", it says "RAW" instead.

When I try to access it, it asks me to format it. But I don't want to do that, cause I still want the files on it.

TTT

anyone have any experience with converting FAT32 to NTSF?

If it's coming up as RAW, it's not even seeing your partitions.

That's not good

You don't have a way to hook the drive up directly without using an external case? Go get a 5$ IDE card from your local computer shop...

I just remembered that I have a spare IDE harddrive so I just plugged it into my old (Dead) desktop and installed XP Pro onto it. So far it works fine and my old old OS HDD is totally dead.

I'm gonna see if I can slave this backup disk to my old desktop (nor restored?) and see if I can't pull the data from it this way. At least load it onto a transfer device (DVDs, ipod, etc) and move those to someplace safer.

Works now.

I reinstalled XP Pro onto that old desktop and plugged in this IDE drive as "slave" and it works fine. Turns out it was NTSF all along.

Now I will just migrate all my data to a safer place(s) and probably wipe these two HDDs and find a new owner for my old desktop.