Tricky One! I Think!!

Hello
i wonder if anyone has any advice on the following.
I used to have a Packard Bell PC with Vista Home Premium on.....If i can remember i upgraded it to Win 7, but something went wrong a while later and i stupidly gave it to someone whom i thought could fix it.. but they didn't, so i sold off most of the PC parts apart from the Hard Drive. I now have a DELL PC with Win 10 on. Anyone know how i could restore the Drive to get some files i want from it? I've tried some data recovery programme but it comes out with recovery files that i do not know how to restore or convert (i think they are .swm files ). Any advice welcome. Thankyou
Al Pal

 

What did you do to the old drive? format it? wipe it? nothing?
What program did you try?

 

If you did nothing to the hard drive prior to dismantling that system, why don't you just connect it to your new system and copy over to that system the data files you want. You don't need to 'restore' anything. You should be able to see exactly what, if anything, is left on that old hard drive. But if you did wipe it, then undelete software may or may not work.
You will of course need the correct leads depending on the exact spec of the old hard drive.

 

I have still got old drive and if i remember i backed up on the drive before upgrading it to win 7

 

Hi
Thats exactly what i done, and if i remember i def could upgrade to Win 7, otherwise i would not have done it. I already have a machine that i can view the files on from my Win 10 PC. i think the problem is i backed them up using the Vista Recovery Program, and now i can see all the files but they look like they are encrypted (my vista used a password to log on). the recovery folder has .swm files which i presume are the files i want but are in another file format.
Thanks for your help so far

 

I didn't wipe or format it. I used a PB backup/recovery program. Lots of files are there but i think some are in .swm recovery format

 

This appears to be how the backup program subdivided the original backup:

https://www.google.com/search?q=.sw.....69i57j0l4.5759j0j8&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8

https://fileinfo.com/extension/swm

https://social.technet.microsoft.co...a-in-swm-files-windows-7?forum=w7itprogeneral

 

Thank you Atlbo I'll check them links out in more detail