old hard drive into new pc = dataloss

[NeoCo]

so a colleague of mine was gonna upgrade his pc with one of our old PCs and he decided to put his sata ssd into the pc that had windows 11 operating system, when he logged into the pc he found that a good chunck of the data like documents and pictures were gone and where categorized under an unknown non-existing drive

 

so he gave me the work to fix this however i can't figure out whats happend.

what i have done is searching file names through the library without any luck and i used windirstat to locate the missing files becuase most of the ssd space is used up however the used up space is no where to be found. and windirstat cannot locate it 100%, it can only find that it's with in his user. but there is nothing there.

 

maybe some files got corrupt because what i noticed is that the old PCs were windows 10 and he plugged in a windows 11 ssd.

 

 

i just need some ideas here on what to do

 

 

 

the old pc

gtx 1660

16 gb ddr3

motherboard is a 970 pro3 r2.0

amd fx(tm)-8350

sata ssd 120gb with windows 11

sata ssd 850gb for games

 

 

the new pc

gtx 970

16gb ddr3

asus maximus vii ranger

intel i5-4690k

sata ssd 250gb with windows 10

[SpookyCitrus]

If the old PC had two drives, the pictures and documents are most likely stored on the secondary drive. It's a very common thing I've seen businesses or people do to save space on smaller boot/os drives. A simple way to test this would be to move his SSD back to the old computer and see if the documents and pictures folders are working again. 

[NeoCo]

1 hour ago, SpookyCitrus said:

If the old PC had two drives, the pictures and documents are most likely stored on the secondary drive. It's a very common thing I've seen businesses or people do to save space on smaller boot/os drives. A simple way to test this would be to move his SSD back to the old computer and see if the documents and pictures folders are working again. 

unfortunately both drives were connected to the new pc at the moment of this happening

[SpookyCitrus]

1 hour ago, NeoCo said:

unfortunately both drives were connected to the new pc at the moment of this happening

Is there a chance there is a third drive or it is setup using MS Onedrive? If it's setup with Onedrive it could be bugged and need to be signed back in. Pictures and documents will save in the Onedrive cloud and not locally on the machine if it's in the default setup.

[NeoCo]

On 3/14/2024 at 8:35 PM, SpookyCitrus said:

Is there a chance there is a third drive or it is setup using MS Onedrive? If it's setup with Onedrive it could be bugged and need to be signed back in. Pictures and documents will save in the Onedrive cloud and not locally on the machine if it's in the default setup.

i checked the case again and there is no third drive. and my colleague  told me he never figured out how one drive works.

however what i think is really weird is the fact that the drive everything is supposed to be on he so much space used yet almost nothing on it. and nothing is showing on either search, hidden files or windirstat

[SpookyCitrus]

1 hour ago, NeoCo said:

i checked the case again and there is no third drive. and my colleague  told me he never figured out how one drive works.

however what i think is really weird is the fact that the drive everything is supposed to be on he so much space used yet almost nothing on it. and nothing is showing on either search, hidden files or windirstat

Did everything disappear, not just documents and pictures but is everything gone, like the downloads folder, desktop items, etc? If so it could have caused an issue to where Windows is loading a temporary user profile.

[NeoCo]

2 minutes ago, SpookyCitrus said:

Did everything disappear, not just documents and pictures but is everything gone, like the downloads folder, desktop items, etc? If so it could have caused an issue to where Windows is loading a temporary user profile.

the original download folder and desktop folder was gone and how i know this is that the pc was originally in english however when the drive got to the new pc it was all in norwegian which is my language so everything got renamed into into norwegian.

from what i can see it's not a temporary user profile and no not all files were lost just a lot were lost.

 

[Terrorgod]

If this was a domain pc, are there any group policies / scripts that may not have been pushed to the new PC to redirect usage. In the past I have seen things like documents folder getting routed into onedrive without user intervention.

[NeoCo]

2 hours ago, Terrorgod said:

If this was a domain pc, are there any group policies / scripts that may not have been pushed to the new PC to redirect usage. In the past I have seen things like documents folder getting routed into onedrive without user intervention.

no neither of the PCs were domain PCs. a few years ago we built a couple of PCs to be not domain pc also we kept them on a normal network not even connected to our servers. and he used the drives from his private pc