Files copied from Windows 7 machine not seen on windows 8

I was working on a windows 8 laptop and wanted to transfer user files to the new laptop. I pulled the drive from the win8 laptop, plugged it into an open sata port on my windows 7 bench machine (which already contained the files to be transferred) and booted without problem. I assigned the windows 8 drive a letter and opened the drive. All the files of the win8 drive were visible. I opened a directory off of the root, created a new directory and copied the files. No problem. I opened some of the image files and all looked well. I shut down the win7 box, pulled the win8 drive and put it back in the laptop and it booted, no problem. When I went looking for the files, they were no where to be found! Win 8 showed the "used space" as if the copy never happened. Thinking I made an error on the copy I shut down the win8 laptop and pulled the drive, plugged it back into the win7 box and booted. The win7 boot detected "file corruption" on the volume in question and did some "orphan" recovering and a bunch of other stuff. When it finally finished and booted all the files copied were in a "found.000" directory. I took ownership and repeated. Funny thing is that while the win7 showed the drive with the expected 40gb of data taking up space, the windows 8 showed the "used space" as if the data wasnt even there? Can someone please explain why as I try to copy the files from the win7 drive converted to a usb external directly into the win8 laptop.
Probably a stupid question and must be a security thing because everything I've read is that the file system is consistent between win7 and win8

That happens all the time when you access Win8 from Win7 or vice versa. I think it is a permission problem but I am not sure.

I suggest to copy the files from Windows 7 to an external drive and then get them from there into Windows 8. Much safer.