New
#1
Trying to copy files from old HDD to new SSD
My dad and I have been trying to get my mom's (RIP) super slow laptop upgraded with a new SSD. We thought we made a backup of the old HDD to an external drive before installing the new SSD, but for some reason the backup didn't work. So now I'm trying to copy files from the old drive to the new.
I hooked up both drives to my desktop PC using SATA cables on the motherboard. Both drives showed up in my Win10 Explorer, but they had yellow triangles on them. Yet I could still access the files on both. After a bit of waiting to gain access to the user folders on each drive (dad's username on the new drive, mom's username on the old drive), I proceeded to copy over the contents of Documents, Pics, Music etc. After copying everything, I put the new SSD back into the laptop and booted up. Once I was in, I went to Windows Explorer on the laptop with the new SSD, and nothing is there! Nothing that I just copied shows up at all. There should be thousands of files and folders but nothing shows up except the folders that were there previously.
Looking at the drive properties, it's about 1/4 full, which is about the same as the old drive (both 500GB), so the files must be there, but Explorer won't show them. I even went into Powershell and went to the directories in question, and none of the copied files or folders would show up there, either.
*edit* both the laptop and my PC are running the latest Win10 version.
What can I do to get these (very important) files copied over? A large USB drive perhaps?