Windows 7: External Hard Drive Detected but not Accessible

Hello,

I have windows 7 32 bit on a toshiba laptop. I am posting becuase this is a strange situation. I have a goflex exteral terrabyte. The computer recognizes it, lists it in the device manager and claims that it is working properly. However, I can't access it, I can't save anything to it, or get anything from it, or even see the files on it.

Now, I have a mac and a pc, the drive said it could be used on both. So i first used it on the mac (and it works perfectly) but not on the pc. It there a share error maybe?

Any help would be appreciated. I am an editor and I was hoping to be able to easily move from my computer (mac) to my clients (pc).

Thank You for any help or opinions you can give.



Misti Stanton
Dallas, TX

P.S. the drives are up to date.

Hi Misti,

The first use of the drive was on the Mac, is that correct? And there is no problem on the Mac - right?
i really don't have an answer, but I've had issues with my own ext HD. The original system I connected it to was XP, then a Vista machine. the HD would request me to chkdsk every time I plugged it in. Then I could see the files and on some volumes access them. Other volumes were set as read-only. After some time just being attached, the HD would mark itself offline.

It will help if you can post a full screen snapshot of Disk Managment.

Thanks,

Bill
.

Have you initialized it in Disk Management?

Type diskmgmt.msc in Search to see the properties on that external.

Do you have a drive letter? Is it formatted in NTFS?

Hi stantonmd,

If you want to move files freely between a Mac and PC, without bothering what Windows version or Mac version they run, then it is best to format your external drive to FAT32. The only limitation here is that with FAT32, the maximum file size is limited to 4GB.

Please go through this article and then decide what you want to do.
How to format a drive for Mac and PC compatibility | MacYourself

Hi again Misti,

Researching two other ext Drive issues, I came across a tutorial on USB devices.

Try following USB Driver - General Fix for Problems.

There are some references in the comment section that help if you run into issues following the instructions.
Particularly INFCACHE.1

• search might not find it - make sure you have "Include system directories" set in your search options or just navigate to the directory cited.
• delete might not allow you to delete it. Pooch skipped a step when he defined changing the security. You also need to give full access to Administrators. or you can follow a comment ot the take ownership tut.
• there is an interesting comment on a known MS bug - post #5 in the tut. The direct MS reference is Binary files in some USB drivers are not updated after you install Windows 7 SP1 or Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 - download the version specific to your machine from the resolution section.

SYMPTOMS
After you install Windows 7 Service Pack 1 (SP1) or Windows Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 1 (SP1), binary files in some USB drivers are not updated. For example, the Usbport.sys, Usbehci.sys, and Winusb.sys binary files are not updated.

There is also a reference to similar issues on MyDigitalLife, but other than some executable I don't know about (I'm always wary of .exe files when a bunch of instructions work), the information seems to be duplicated there (or here).

Bill
.