Win7 and External drives

I have 2 new WD 500gb ext drives that I formatted in Fat32 ( with special downloaded proggy ) so that I can use it through my set top box to watch *.avi movies, as in NTFS they won't play. At first I could copy movies off my h/d on to them , but now win7 won't recognize the files on the ext drive at all and tells me i need to format it ?? in device mgr it has a drive letter and all looks ok, in win explorer it shows up but and has a drive letter but says it needs formatting to work... put it on my set top box or boot into another OP sys and all is ok = can see all the movies no worries = it must be something in win 7 ?? I have looked at plenty of sites for help, but no go.

any help would be nice :-}

SOLUTION FOR ME = even though win7 had given it a "H" drive # I still couldn't use it , I went into MANAGE . DRIVE MANAGER and right clicked on the PARTITION then changed the drive letter to "R" and all is well again

There are lots of problems with FAT32 external drives on WIN 7, but what often works if Win 7 can't see or use such a drive properly, but has the drive letter, is to go to drive policies and see if "Better Performance" is checked. If it is, change it to "quick removal" and reboot, then change it back to "Better Performance" again. I have no idea why this works, but it usually does.

Write-Caching - Enable or Disable



nine times out of ten this solves the problem. Of course you have to use the "Safely Remove Hardware and Eject Media" when you remove the drive, but that's not a big problem.

Regards....Mike Connor