Hey everyone! I hope this isn't too silly of a question, but I'm not very tech-savvy and tend to get anxious about these things. My laptop is acting up and it's becoming unusable, so I'm researching options for fixing it cheaply. If it turns out to be a lost cause, I plan to get an SSD enclosure to pull the data from the old laptop to another PC. I have some important creative projects on there that I haven't backed up—my bad! I really don't want to lose them or have to recreate everything.
I've done some research and watched a few videos, and it looks like many people have managed to do this successfully. However, I have a couple of worries:
1) Could connecting the old SSD, which has its OS data, to another computer with its own OS cause any issues? I'm paranoid about the possibility of it trying to install a fresh OS or something like that.
2) My laptop was password protected and linked to a Microsoft account. Does this mean the data could be encrypted or otherwise protected, making it trickier to access on another computer?
I know these might sound like silly concerns, but I want to be careful not to mess things up any further. Thanks a ton for any help!
2 Answers
1) There shouldn't be any issues just by connecting the SSD to another PC.
2) You may need to 'take ownership' of the files on the new PC, which is pretty straightforward if you’re the admin on that computer (which you should be). It should be a simple process.
The easiest route is to upload your important files to a cloud storage service and then download them onto your new device. But since your laptop is slow and crashing, that might not be feasible.
1. If you have BitLocker enabled and you don’t have the recovery key, you might not be able to access your files. If there's no BitLocker, then you should be good to go.
2. Your Microsoft account shouldn’t complicate things too much, but keep in mind the first point about BitLocker.
Related Questions
Lenovo Thinkpad Stuck In Update Loop Install FilterDriverU2_Reload