Will I be able to access hard drive?

[Valley_]

My friend wants me to take some photos off her harddrive and move them to a USB stick. I plan to remove hard drive from laptop, plug into my PC via sata, then take files and move to USB stick. The hard drive will also has the OS on it, will this prevent me from accessing the photos stored on there?

[Oshino Shinobu]

Assuming it's not encrypted via something like Bitlocker, you should be able to access the drive no problem. You may need to assign it a drive letter in disk management if it doesn't assign one automatically, but that's about it.

[Valley_]

1 minute ago, Oshino Shinobu said:

Assuming it's not encrypted via something like Bitlocker, you should be able to access the drive no problem. You may need to assign it a drive letter in disk management if it doesn't assign one automatically, but that's about it.

Brilliant that's what I was expecting but wanted to be sure. Hopefully the laptop doesn't have some kind of drive encryption built in

[aDoomGuy]

You may also need to give yourself permissions to access the folder(s) but that shouldn't be a problem either.

[tikker]

At the risk of stating the obvious, wouldn't it be easier to plug the USB stick in the laptop and just copy it over? You'll have it anyway to take the drive and without the drive with the OS the laptop isn't usable anyway (unless there's another drive with an OS somewhere).

[Luka95]

My only concern is that your windows will mark her windows on that drive as windows old, and maybe it will not work anymore when you put it back at her laptop, but am not sure, if she doesn't need it anyway than you can do what you wanted with no problem..

[Oshino Shinobu]

21 minutes ago, Luka95 said:

My only concern is that your windows will mark her windows on that drive as windows old, and maybe it will not work anymore when you put it back at her laptop, but am not sure, if she doesn't need it anyway than you can do what you wanted with no problem..

It won't as it's on another drive.

[Thomas4]

Just plug her USB stick into her computer and using the File Explorer to copy either the directory onto the stick.

 

Another way with File Explorer. In the GUI that opens, right click on the directory where the photos are and choose "Send To" on the popup screen and choose the USB stick. If she doesn't want the entire directory contents copied, open the directory and drag and drop the files onto the icon for the USB stick on the left side bar.

 

Also, on the top bar, there is the option, under Drive Tools to either copy OR move the directory or files.

 

Copy leaves the photos where they are plus on the USB  stick

MOVE removes the files from the drive where they are now ONLY on the USB stick.