XP Anyone?

[Mike McCall]

This may turn out to be another opportunity to look stupid, but here goes.

Customer has and old XP (SP3) box he wants to move data from to a new WD Elements 2TB drive. It's been awhile since I've played with XP, but figured out I needed to change a BIOS USB setting from high speed to full/low speed to get the keyboard and mouse to work. Anyway, it won't see the Elements drive in My Computer, though it correctly sees it in the device manager.

So I shut it down, pull the drives and connect them both to a Win10 machine. Now I can see the Elements drive, but not his system drive. I try to initialize it, but get an error message saying the drive is not ready.

I recalled something about XP having a size limit so I made a 500GB partition on the Elements drive.

I reinstall the drive in its host computer and I get the same thing - boots fine but still can't see the Elements drive.

Move to my laptop this time and boot into Linux Mint, and it can see the Elements drive but not the XP drive.

It's probably obvious, but I would have thought XP should be able to see the Elements drive, or Windows or Linux should have been able to see the XP drive.

 

[phaZed]

As far as the Elements drive, XP doesn't support 4K sectors, maybe that's at play?

 

[Mike McCall]

As far as the Elements drive, XP doesn't support 4K sectors, maybe that's at play?

Ah, good catch. I'll reformat the 500GB section

 

[fincoder]

Or the Elements drive might initialised as GPT instead of the older MBR type.

 

[Porthos]

I just boot from my parted magic disk and copy what I need.
A Win PE disk with Fabs should work too. You will need a 32bit PE disk I think.

 

[Mike McCall]

Ok, so the XP machine now sees the Elements drive. I kept my copy of Fabs6 which runs fine on XP. I seem to recall he stopped supporting XP in a more recent version, though I also have the current one. Files are being copied now. Thanks!

 

[Porthos]

Ok, so the XP machine now sees the Elements drive. I kept my copy of Fabs6 which runs fine on XP. I seem to recall he stopped supporting XP in a more recent version, though I also have the current one. Files are being copied now. Thanks!

I have not seen an XP machine in years. Good thing the client did something about it albeit a few years late.

 

[Markverhyden]

With XP you shouldn't have to do anything in BIOS to see a USB KB and mouse. SP3 has all the drivers loaded. Since the WD drive was new did you look in disk management (or what ever) to see if it showed up as an unallocated drive?

At any rate something like this I just boot from a *nix stick. The problem with your laptop maybe related to the USB2SATA bridge for the patients. And don't forget about Gandalf's PE. Just spend the $20 to get the latest PE.

 

[Mike McCall]

I have not seen an XP machine in years. Good thing the client did something about it albeit a few years late.

Other than being filthy inside it's actually in good shape. But, yeah, I haven't seen one in quite a while so I forget stuff.

 

[Mike McCall]

With XP you shouldn't have to do anything in BIOS to see a USB KB and mouse. SP3 has all the drivers loaded. Since the WD drive was new did you look in disk management (or what ever) to see if it showed up as an unallocated drive?

At any rate something like this I just boot from a *nix stick. The problem with your laptop maybe related to the USB2SATA bridge for the patients. And don't forget about Gandalf's PE. Just spend the $20 to get the latest PE.

I could get the keyboard to work in the BIOS, but no keyboard or mouse once booted. Had to change the setting in the BIOS to get them to work.

The external drive couldn't be seen at all in XP. It showed up fine in Windows and Linux as NTFS. The XP system drive still couldn't be seen by either Windows or Linux, which could be the USB2SATA bridge. I got to use my IODD for this so that was fun

 

[Metanis]

I just bought 2 brand new Seagate 2TB externals. They were formatted exFAT! Windows 10 could read them just fine but refused to do an image backup until I reformatted them NTFS. Windows XP will only detect exFAT if you install kb955704.

 

[Mike McCall]

I just bought 2 brand new Seagate 2TB externals. They were formatted exFAT! Windows 10 could read them just fine but refused to do an image backup until I reformatted them NTFS. Windows XP will only detect exFAT if you install kb955704.

Interesting. Formatting the external drive did the trick fortunately. I'll bet by the time I get another XP machine again I'll have forgotten all about any exFAT kb's.