Requesting assistance accessing a WIN7 hard drive using my WIN10 PC.

[96s10]

So I've got a stack of old hard drives in my garage with tons of old photos. I purchased a Sabrent USB 3.0 to SATA drive adaptor cable through Amazon. I was thinking in today's age I could just plug the hard drive in using the cable and Windows 10 would be recognized.

I though wrong. Using Disk Management I'm able to see the disk which is not initialized and is listed as unknown. When I select initilatize I get two options; MBR or GPT. Regardless of which I click it always comes back with "The request failed due to a fatal device error."

Does this mean all of my hard drives are trashed?

Is my Sabrent adaptor cable junk?

Am I missing a step?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

*Edit and now I've read initializing the disk will erase all the files. I guess my troubles are a blessing in disguise?

 

[trents]

Were these old hard drives storage drives or system drives?

There is a free program called Mini Tool Partition Wizard that will convert MBR drives to GPT drives or vice versa on the fly without wiping them. As far as I know, the only caveat is that changing the partition scheme of the target disk will render it unbootable if it is a system disk. If your host computer's system disk has the GPT partition scheme then try using Mini Tool to convert one of the old drives to GPT. Mini Tool will also tell you what is the partition scheme of all the disks, including those on the host computer.

 

[Automata]

Windows 10 should read both partition formats. Connect the drive internally.

 

[Alaric]

Windows 10 should recognize it. Sometimes it won't .When I installed W10 I had a 2 TB storage drive in the rig (dual boot w/separate physical boot drives). The storage drive had been set up under Windows 7, and was formatted-not GPT. I tried everything I could find online, including a couple weeks of the very smart folks here trying to help. Eventually I had to transfer the data (1.5 TB. No fun to move) and format it in GPT to get Windows 10 to recognize it.

I hope the OP has better luck than I did. I don't recall seeing a lot of that problem at the time, and for the ones I did see they had comparatively easy fixes. Maybe Windows 10 sensed I hated it and was recalcitrant.

 

[caddi daddi]

I have had good luck accessing drives widows would not open using linux and moving files to another drive.
you can try it by running linux in A live "session", you can run most linux os's from A dvd or usb drive, just make sure the drive you want to move the files to is formatted NTFS.