Windows 7 - Working external drive - Windows 7 wants to format it!!

Today I upgraded my 64 bit Vista Ultimate to 32 bit Seven Ultimate (retail). I did it by using the DVD to boot up and do a custom install as it wouldn't do a standard upgrade cos of the 32 bit/64 bit clash.

Anyway, it worked smoothly up until I go to my external hard drive to look at some old photos. I plug it in and it gets recognised, but then I get told that it needs formatting before it can be used. No way am I doing that!

I check the hard drive on another machine running XP and the drive is fine.

Any idea what's going on?

Perhaps I should just format the C drive and do a completely clean re-install of Seven?

Thanks,

Henry

I'm no expert, but maybe you could just backup all your photos and stuff onto another computer and then let windows 7 "format" it, while you keep all of your data on your XP machine. I'm pretty sure somebody can come up with a better idea than that though.

If it's the case of formating the drive or re-stinstalling the OS, i would choose the former. Cos you don't know if re-installing the OS would get rid of the issue.

I agree. Just move your files onto another drive using your XP machine and format the drive as Windows 7 requests. The move your files back.

THe successful install of Windows 7 doesn't have anything to do with the state of your external now, so no need to reinstall 7.

You checked your files all out when you plugged that external into XP, right? Because I would otherwise wonder if it somehow got deleted when you were formatting drive(s) for Windows 7. Usually it prompts for formatting when it has been deleted but not yet formatted.