Recovery of files in One Drive folder.

I removed the hard drive from a HP laptop with a bad motherboard, intending to plug it into a USB drive dock attached to a laptop to copy the files to a USB flash drive.

When the drive was attached to a PC running Windows 10 I could see and copy hundreds of files under the USERS/xxx/One Drive folder.

I could not see any files in this folder when the drive was attached to a PC running Windows 7.

I could not see any files in the One Drive folder when running Linux Mint.

The USER account was not one of my own, did not have the matching Microsoft email address and password.

Just wondering why this happens?

Thanks,
Steve

Unless you have actually accessed those files, they do not really exist on the disk. They just show a "virtual" view of your remote files. This is because many people complained that their disks were being filled up with hundreds of gigabytes worth of files they were keeping in OneDrive. You may be able to turn this off and just have it download all the files.