XP question: How can I access data on "spare" hard drives?

My son was a computer wiz and until he died last year he did all the setup and 99% of the tech support for everyone in the family. Since he died I have learned a lot about setting up computers with Win10 (thanks again to those who have helped me learn) but when it comes to XP (which I used for almost a decade) I need to ask questions.

I know he was storing data that he didn't need ready access to on spare hard drives. I have found a bunch of them among his stuff that are labelled (& more that aren't) and I need to know how to look at what is on them.

I have computers here with Win10, Win7 XP. I'm pretty sure he wrote the data with one of the XP machines and I would like to use the one I just replaced with the Win 10 machine I am typing this on but the only info I can find online deals with initiating new (empty) drives.

I know this forum is for Win10 (that's why I posted this in this section) but hopefully someone will remember enough about XP to help me out. Can I just plug the drive in and let Windows find it or do I have to do something in Disc Managament? What if the drive has Windows installed on it?

Any help would be much appreciated.

Thanks for answering.

Its Win7 Ultimate 32 bit. I'm not sure which version of XP would have been on the computer he wrote to those discs from. His main computer has XP Pro (he had another with 10 that he was about to "move into") but he probably used a different one for that. He had a lot of other computers there (his goal was to collect one of every type of PC) and he always had several connected to his KVM switch. My old computer is also XP pro.

I still have about half of his stuff here and there is a USBX-804 external drive bay with a DVD burner in it that I should be able to easily use for examining the "spare" hard drives and I am downloading the FalconFour's Disc as I type this.

The drives in question are all 30 & 40 GB and the XP computer I want to use has a 160Gb hdd so I am hoping I will be able to copy any data I want to keep onto that and from there to my 2TB network drive.

If you read the info on falcon site it should be a snap, as long as nothing is locked.

Unfortunately my brain is slightly mushy at moment, need an IV of caffeine and on phone.

Guinness and Ales from Monks, and lack of sleep.

My xp pro can be thawed if necessary, it's presently at -20* F in the garage.

Should be simple copy /paste to hard drive for storage.

Try onesies, twosies until you get the hang of it. Shriek if you need assistance.

Between the falcons and Hirens still loaded on the falcon disk shouldn't be an issue to c&p.

If I need to thaw my desktop that could take awhile, on call and it needs quite awhile to thaw out. It's COLD OUTSIDE [emoji41]

I've only seen one XP Pro 64-bit so, we can pray none of his drives are that.

Your son sounds like my kinda guy, still running some WFWG for one customer. HDD's and laptops abound.

Read the instructions from his text FF and set your computer to boot from DVD or cd and all should be golden.

Its -20f(-29c) in Maine? Wow, its +3c(37f) here in central Ontario.

It took me a while because he had that computer set up to boot fast so when I turned it on nothing showed until it started to boot in XP. I went into the BIOS, reverted to default settings and then tried to change the boot order but it still didn't try to boot to the CD until I remembered to press F12 for temporary boot order change. I am learning (& remembering stuff I knew years ago) but it feels like a slow process sometimes.

And then it ignored the FalconFour disc and booted straight to XP. I think I must have done something wrong burning the FalconFour disc. The download saved as FalconFour's Ultimate Boot CD v4.61.7z and I right clicked that and selected Send to>DVD RW drive and chose Like USB drive

While I was looking for the FF disc I found that it is based on the Hiren's Disc so I dug out my copy of that, booted with it and ran Mini XP. I opened up the drive bay, plugged one of the HDDs into it, plugged it in and turned it on and it found nothing. I found it in device manager and installed the driver but when it asked to reboot nothing happened. The taskbar (including Start button) was unresponsive and it didn't respond to clicking the desktop and then Alt+F4 so after waiting a few minutes I shut it down with the power button and tried again. and it seems to work now.

I tried 3 of the HDDs and found one with my last Win98 setup, one that is apparently empty and one with TV shows (all 7 seasons of TNG among others )

The one with the TV shows doesn't have a Windows installation on it so after I have looked at the rest of the HDDs I'll try looking at that one without the Hiren's disc and see what happens. But right now I need to do other stuff for a while, starting with finding something to eat.

If you have difficulty burning *.iso try using
ImgBurn, set at lowest and slowest speed for burning.

My present Windows 10 can burn iso's but, I've been on call for too long (48th hour) I find the
ImgBurn takes the coffee coaster (useless DVD)
away from the equation.

Not near a computer still on blasted iPhone at moment. I wonder if you tried a DVD where a Cd was required.

If you have Hirens and like it , you should be fine. I've used that and Knoppix and Falcons Four.

I finally have relief, need a nap. May be conscious tomorrow or tonight.

You seem to have everything handled nicely Mini XP is fun[emoji41].

It sounds like you need to get some rest more than I need a fast answer so look after yourself before you even think about this.

I can manage what I want/need to do right now with the Hiren's disc but it sounds like the FalconFour one might be useful to have so I would like to learn how and burn it properly.

No, I did burn it to a DVD but I'm pretty sure I know what I did wrong. FalconFour's Ultimate Boot CD v4.61.7z is a 7zip folder, not a disc image. It had to percolate in the back of my mind for a couple of hours before it occurred to me to look up what a .7z file is.

I have downloaded 7zip and unzipped the file but I am still not entirely sure what to do with its contents. Its odd that he includes instructions for putting it onto a USB drive but not for burning it to a DVD but he does say that it is intended for IT pros so I guess a pro would be expected know that. Should I burn the ISO file to a DVD?

BTW RE burning: This is the first time I have burned an ISO CD and also the first time I have burned anything except dinner since I started using my Win10 computer. Since it burned the first attempt I know there must be a program in Win10 for burning but the only thing I can find in the Apps List is Media Player. Can I use that or should I install ImgBurn for this?

Your son sounds like my kinda guy, still running some WFWG for one customer. HDD's and laptops abound.

Matt lived in a 1 bedroom 3rd floor walk-up and had so much stuff he had to keep a lot of it packed in boxes to fit it in. It took 3 Saturdays to move everything to our house. My wife & I went beforehand and brought the computers he used and a couple that I knew he was working on for specific people home. Between the computers he was collecting and the ones he had for parts we had to carry over 100 of them down those stairs, plus several boxes of laptops and a lot of other stuff. The first week we filled a 4'x8'x2' trailer, a 4'x8'x5' trailer, 4 or 5 cars & a pickup truck. The second week we only had the smaller trailer, 3 cars and a pickup and the last weekend we just had the smaller trailer and 2 cars.

When we unloaded it at our house we started putting computers in the garage and boxes in his room in our basement (which already had about 25-30 of the oldest computers in his collection). When the room was full we started piling boxes in front of the pile of computers.
By the time it was all here it looked like this downstairs


And like this in the garage




If you look closely you can see one of my sidecar outfits in the garage. I needed to make room so I could get that one running (minor repairs) and then take the other one apart for major engine work so I sorted through the stuff in the garage and then had a sale to find good homes for what was in there (proceeds to the Canadian Foodgrains Bank). I am planning another sale in the spring once I have a chance to sort through the rest of it (which I need to get started on real soon )

Try the Falcons Four UBCD at Falcons Four. Com it loads on a CD.

Other versions forDVD/ USB. For me after 48 years in computers since Arpanet, I prefer the more simple method - ImgBurn.

No more coasters

You can get 7z to ISO converters or view you tube user "foon baba" tutorial.

I was overtired and crashed for 24 hours, sorry. Guess I'm not 60 anymore.

I understand. I haven't been a teenager for a long time and I don't think I could stay up for 48 hours let alone still be coherent by the end.

There is an ISO in the folder where I extracted the 7z. Should I just burn the ISO to a disc?

My first experience with a computer was an IBM 1130 in high school about 45 years ago. We were learning Fortran IV but other classes learned SL1C, COBOL &c and you had to change the disc to change the language. They were inch thick iron discs in blue plastic enclosures and IIRC it took something like half an hour for one to spin down and 10 or 15 minutes for the next one to spin up. They gave us optical mark cards in class but some of us got permission from the typing teacher to use the keypunch machines after hours so our decks were 1/4 the size. A couple of years later a guy I knew had a Sinclair computer with about a foot of RAM modules plugged into it (held in place with electric tape) and not long after that Commodores started showing up in people's homes.

But that is ancient history and even though I have spent thousands of hours sitting in front of PCs over the last couple of decades there are a lot of things Matt always did for me so I never needed to know how.

BTW: I ended up only saving 2 of the HDDs, the one with all the TV shows and one that crashed in his network drive (makes funny noise like a bad bearing) that he had hopes of eventually recovering data from. The rest I formatted to play with.

What the heck give it a shot. Just burn it low and slow.

Try as I may I can't think Windows when looking at iPhone.

Think I still have Commodore in the garage filing cabinet with 5 Thinkpads.

There are recovery programs for hdd's freeware on Linux maybe.

Depends on how nasty the bearing sound is, for chances.

Hopefully, this is guide me by the hand link to burning on Windows 10


Burn ISO/IMG File From Command Prompt In Windows 10

Looks good on blasted phone again. Need sunshine, will remain upright for @ least 8 more hours.

Enjoy the burn