Windows 7: Seagate external hard drive not accessible as a drive

My drive is a Western Digital, but other than that, same symptoms.

Ive got two 2TB Lacie external drives which Windows 7 wont write to,. Can read initially, but when I try to write Windows 7 say theres something wrong with the usb device and stop showing it.....

Having same problem, and when I finally threw away my patience, I ended up making my external drive to an internal drive, and it still doesn't work...

I fixed my problem with the external hard drives by installing win 7 32bit instead of 64 bit. My pc came with Vista 64 bit out of the box. Sorted.

Hi,I'm having similar problems with my Seagate usb drive. Once every maybe 10th time I boot, Win 7 will say that the drive must be formated before use. But the drive appears on the "Computer" and seems to work fine. I'm using Win 7 RC1/64 bit. However, I need to do a Image Restore at this time and the program won't find the drive to load the image. My computer won't boot at all. I'm using the Image Restore from the dvd boot disk.

Turned out to be a permissions problem. right click on the object (drive) go to security, advanced, change permissions, add you, and tell it you want to take ownership of this resource.

I'm not an it guy. Just stumbled on it by chance.

Have fun,
Norm

I struggled with this for a day. Then, just before paying tech support, I chose to open the device in Computer Management and selected uninstall. I unplugged the Seagate and rebooted. Then I plugged the Seagate (500 gig) back in to the usb. Worked like a champ!

This solution worked for me. Thank you so much!

I also had the problem and this solution worked!! Thank-you!!
Maybe Seagate should post this on their site. It would have saved me quite a lot of time.

I have a seagate ext HD as well on a 64 bit system and all is working fine. I have noticed if I had it unplugged I would need to plug it in and let it go to sleep before booting computer. On a fresh boot it picks up every time... GL