by the way, if when running on the Hiren’s cd or usb stick, you still cant see any files on the external sata drive, then we can do some further steps. so i would suggest that maybe you should start with one of the drives that had asked for a password.

then again, maybe not, just a thought.

also check the desktop, mydocs and download folders on the old sata drive for stuff that you may have forgotten about.

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Sometimes back in the day I would be asked to recover a vast amount of data, 50=100 plus gigs from an old sata drive, and the laptop or pc that they wanted the data to be copied onto, did not have room for that amount of data, or the laptop/PC I was copying to was an old/slow machine.

I knew that it would take up to 10-20 hours or longer to copy, so I would copy a few files over to the laptop or pc first, then reboot from the laptop or PC, and check that the files I copied over were not corrupt and worked as expected on the laptop or PC system I had copied them to.
if the copied files were OK then I would reboot using the Hiren’s boot cd or usb pen-drive, and delete the windows folder on the old sata drive.
[having first ascertained from the customer that the old external drive was not required to run again from the installed windows on it]

then when I rebooted from the windows on the laptop/PC it would not see the windows folder on the old sata drive because it was no longer there, and would not ask for a password to access the old drive.

probably best not to do this unless you have to, but i wanted to mention it as i have done it many many times in the past successfully -----

God Bless

Roy

Last edited by Roy Cooper; 04/02/25 12:05 PM.
'You Have To Kiss A Lot Of Frogs To Find A Prince'