Hope someone can help. My PC crashed recently and as I was planning to buy a new one I didnt bother to reformat it. I took the HDD from it and placed it in a case with the intention of using is as a Portable HDD. When I plug it in to my new PC, it recognizes that its almost full of data, but wont let me access it. A friend of mine told me that it may be because I already have one My Documents folder on my C Drive, so it cant recognize two.

Can someone let me know whether its possible to access the data on the portable HDD, and if not how do I wipe it in order to free up some space.

Cheers

Hey there moonos21

You may have to activate the hard drive first in Disk management.

To do this click Start > Run and type diskmgmt.msc and click OK.
The Disk Management snap-in will open

There should be an unallocated drive underneath your C:\ DRIVE, if you are unsure then post a screenshot for us to view.

You should be able to right click on it and either enable or allocate the drive space.
Once it is enabled you can format it and copy information to it.

More help can be found on the microsoft site:
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=309000

Thanks again, great advice as usual!

Before I format it, is it possible to access the data thats already on it? Ive got some pics that I want to access. Theres no free space on it at all at the moment, but I cant find any data on it.

Thanks

Once you enable the drive you should be able to access the data on it.

• Can you see the second drive in disk management?
• If so what options do you get when you right click on the drive?

This is what I get when I right click on the drive. Not sure whether the screenshots will work. Thanks!
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Is that drive showing a drive letter, sorry I can't see it in your screenshot?

I notice that you have two unallocated bits of space, one 4GB and the other 76GB

Try right click on the 4GB and see if you can set the partition as active, otherwise click on the change drive letter/path. Give it a letter e.g F
And then do the same for the 76GB and give it the next letter - G