Windows7 can't see my external HD. Linux can.

Fidelio · 06 Jul 2010

Hi all,
I'm pretty new to using windows . Previously I used Ubuntu and I still do. I have an external USB drive ( a fujistu 250Gb thing) which I used with linux, using an ext3 filesytem. I've tried using linux to delete all partitions, and also to format it to FAT and NTFS, but windows won't recognise it whatever I do. I just get an error saying that my USB device has malfunctioned.
Any ideas what I can do to get Windows to see it again? It works fine in windows.
Any ideas?
Thanks

Night Hawk · 07 Jul 2010

FIrst take a look in the Disk Management tool to see any volume that same size is seen there. The drive may be listed as offline and need to be initialized since reformatted from the Linux file journaling system.

For each drive listed a square box is seen on the left side as seen in the image attached below. Once you click on that a right click will bring up a menu of option where you would select "online" and then right click on the main volume to the right to select a drive letter or add a new drive if prompted for that.