Old XP hdd needs to be initialized on Win7 or Vista thru usb

Hi I have a bit of a problem here,

I have a Perfectly functioning harddrive full off data that comes out of a broken XP machine (not sure if it was NTFS or FAT), When i put it into an external USB enclosure and connect it on another computer with Vista Or Win 7 (I even tried XP in a virtual machine)
it sais the drive needs to be initialised before i can use it, I know that when i do this i will loose all data on the drive (which is not an option)
I am 100% positive that the drive is okay, and i had this problem before with connecting old XP drives to new computers (hence i know that i will loose all data if i initialise, did this once)
How can i solve this problem?
anybody have any experience with this?

Thanks in advance

 

This sounds really odd, as I was in a similar position once, and I plugged the old HDD in via an Enclosure, onto a Win Vista machine, and it worked like a charm. This makes me wonder. I would've thought that it would have something to do with the type(NTFS or FAT) but seems as though you tried with both Vista, 7, AND XP, it seems odd. If anyone else has a resolution, it'd be cool to find out!

 

i'm trying UFS explorer right now, but it takes 5 hrs to finish scanning the drive ...

 

You are not the first. Windows 7 does this A LOT. I am clashing heads with 7 many many times at its stupidity. I have no idea how to solve it besides using a 3rd party data recovery app, and getting all the data of it that way. Or plug it in a xp machine.

 

its the differences between NTFS versions. Win7 is (I think) 4 or 5 dot levels advanced in NTFS versions over XP. Both XP and Win7 can read each others NTFS filesystems, but Win7 can be a little particular on things like extended attributes for security and runlevels.

The biggest hassle is the security of the recycle bin in each external drive. I sometimes need to reset the recycle bin (remove it, eject the drive, reacquire the drive, rebuild the recycle bin) before things will settle down.

You can get to the recycle bin properties via disk admin or system properties.

 

after spending a whole day trying to make it work
(tried virtually everything, ufsexplorer, getdataback, built it into a spare computer and bootet from it, but i could not log in because the usb controller was not installed and the spare machine had no ps2, tried another spare computer with ps2 but then it would not boot, tried paragon partition explorer)
i decided to tell my client that its hopeless and that if he wants his data back he'd have to go to a specialized data recovery center which would set him back $1000.
He should have taken backups in the first place.

What a waste of time and money on my part since i could not charge him anything ....

It's the 3rd time now that I have something like this, i guess there's no way to make it work ...