Access Windows NTFS Windows 7 Hard Drive through USB External Docking Bay in XP

Your XP laptop should be able to read NTFS with no trouble.  XP itself can run on FAT32 or NTFS but it reads NTFS natively

Is it not protected?

It's asking to format the hard drive before it can be used.

Just tried 'Another' Hard Disk from a Window XP Laptop (3rd laptop). It can be read... so I wonder if it's because NTFS under Windows 7 is different?

Or is it Master Bootdisk Record thingy that's part of the original issue?

Is there a program that will run within XP that can fix the disk?

It had a password, so yes on encryption I guess.

About 500Gb in size.

In Disk Management I can see two partitions. It takes a while for the second to show. The first one is called 'System Reserved' when viewed in explorer.

When it was in the owning laptop it can part way through Windows boot up. I couldn't get to the restore tools when using an original Windows Disk to try and fix it. I wondered if the original Laptop had another hardware fault.

It may be the win 7 hard drive is starting to fail, hence you are getting delays in displaying the drive information in disk management. The system reserved, is most likely a operating system recovery partition that some manufacturers put on the drive so that the user can recover the drive to the way it was when it came from the manufacturer (note using the factory restore will delete any user data, new updates, and new apps that were installed since the computer was first purchased).

I would run some tests on the drive to test the integrity of the drive.

Can you post a screen shot of Disk Management showing the USB attached partitions?

I have run testdisk and it's pulling down 100,000's of files.. I wonder what the most simple way to get this mounted in an external HDD dock?

I had a password for the user so I expect that I need to do something to export the key? I can't boot in to safe mode unfortunately.

Any ideas?

What tools can get the security key?

I  replaced the harddrive myself so I presume it's not a TPM. What is cause of action in that case?

It's a Dell Latitude D830 (the other laptop hdd in a similar position is Dell Latitude d620 - hdd repaced by me so should be free from TPM).

From the Latitude D830 specifications page:

"User & System Security  ...  Trusted Platform Module 1.2 ..."

So it appears there is indeed a TPM module that protected the system.


Note:   The D620 also has a TPM module (in fact it's the same revision as the D820)

When you have systems with these modules, the FIRST thing you should do is export the key and the utility they provide for reading disks.    As I noted above, I'm not aware of any other way to recover the data from them.     Hopefully you can put the drive back in the original system and successfully fix the Windows boot issue -- even if you can only get to Safe mode, that would at least let you export the TPM key.

Would teskdisk let me get the files if TPM was turned on in bios on original laptop? I've got lots of the files back you see.

How do you export the key if I can somehow get to safemode?