Unable to access or format external hard drives

[qcddoc2012]

Hey guys, a soldier came in today requesting some files and guess what kind of drive he had? Yep, you guessed it, the ADATA SH93. It is a very popular drive over here in Afghanistan because it supposed to be very ruggedized and even water proof.

Well, I plugged it into my Windows 7 computer and low and behold it recognized the drive and I was able to access it and transfer files to it. I took a snapshot of the disk managment to show you guys. It is a FAT32 file system. I don't know what was wrong with those other two ADATA drives but this one seems to work just fine. The really odd thing with those other drives is that they did work with windows Vista.

 

[jumanji]

Those two AData drives that couldn't be read on Windows 7 only will still remain a mystery. Perhaps if you could send one of those to me, I can do some research on it.

 

[Slartybart]

Thanks guys for all of your help; however, at this time I don't care to continue. I am very busy over here in Afghanistan with the war effort. These drives mean absolutely nothing to me. They belong to two different soldiers who wanted to get some movies off of me. I gave up and told them that they would have to get a different type of drive. They both got different drives and I have already transfered hundreds of movies to their new drives without any problems. Obviously neither of you are able to help solve this conundrum. Out of hundreds of other drives that I work with daily, these are the only two drives that have given me any problems. It no longer interests me to continue. Again, thank you for your time.

Sounds like a solution to me!

Although, I have to say that remote troubleshooting is difficult at best... I don't think we really started trying to provide a solution - I was still in "Understand the issue" mode.

I'm glad you came to a solution that everyone accepted and the soldiers were able to get some R&R watching movies.

Bill.

 

[Slartybart]

Hey guys, a soldier came in today requesting some files and guess what kind of drive he had? Yep, you guessed it, the ADATA SH93. It is a very popular drive over here in Afghanistan because it supposed to be very ruggedized and even water proof.

Well, I plugged it into my Windows 7 computer and low and behold it recognized the drive and I was able to access it and transfer files to it. I took a snapshot of the disk managment to show you guys. It is a FAT32 file system. I don't know what was wrong with those other two ADATA drives but this one seems to work just fine. The really odd thing with those other drives is that they did work with windows Vista.

Ext HDDs can get flaky depending on the machines they're connected to. Apple machines have difficulty sometinmes and they might "fix" the drive to their liking... I don't know this for certain.

The FAT32 format is the most universal, but Win7 (and Vista?) defaults to NTFS. There was also a "new" 4k disk std that seems not to be fully implemented on all devices... especially oif the HD is shared with who knows what (Xbox?, XP?, Mac?...)

That's somewaht along the lines I was headed with the other two HDs - clean them to an uniitalized state and let Windows 7 initialize, partition, and format.

I would have suggested NTFS, but with this new information, you might consider using FAT32 format on all ext HDs over there.

Bill
.