Old hard drive - converted to external - missing files

[MattCats10]

Hello everyone! I'm new to the forum and after searching other posts, I didn't find what I was looking for. Maybe I'm searching for the wrong thing! Regardless, I'm hoping someone can help or point me in the right direction.

Here's the scenario: I had a Mac for many years and loved every minute. After taking a new job I was forced to move to a PC. After nearly 5 years of begging, I was allowed to get a brand new MBP last week. In the interim, my older (2008) model MBP died because of a bad logic board and wouldn't boot. Now that I have a new MBP, I thought I would take my old hard drive and convert it to an external so as to recover some of my old files.

I pulled the old hard drive out of my dead MBP and put it in a Akitio case and it fits/boots just fine except for one small problem: I can see there is space used on the (old) external drive, but can't see the actual files. In "My Documents," for instance, there is almost 53GB of space listed as used, but no files to view. Anyone have a fix?

I've tried using Migration Assistant to locate/transfer the files and although it shows documents to transfer, all it does is spin and doesn't transfer anything.

Thanks for taking the time to read!

Sincerely,
Matt

 

[Raz0rEdge]

Welcome to Mac-Forums

Are you booting into your new MBP and plugged in the old HD or booting into the old HDD itself? Your post was a little confusing. If you are doing the latter, I would recommend doing the former and plugging in the old HDD as an external drive. Then, in Finder, it should show up as "Macintosh HD" unless you changed the name of the old drive.

Data shouldn't necessarily disappear, but you might want to run a disk check/verify to make sure that it's all valid.

 

[MattCats10]

Hey Ashwin - sorry for the confusion. I'm booting the new MBP then plugging the external (old) drive in. It does show up as "Macintosh HD" on the desktop and that's where I'm missing some files. Some - like photos I downloaded from my phone - I can find. The ones I'm mainly interested in, however, are missing.