Older Simpletech External HDD Not Recognized

[caligrown]

We just purchased a new Dell PC for the office, to replace an older Dell XP machine. Not sure if it was the discontinuation of support for XP, but we started experiencing some big problems with the older computer very soon following.

Anyway, I am trying to transfer documents via a Simpletech 250GB external hdd from the older PC running XP, to this new PC running 7 Pro, and am experiencing some issues:

*(External HDD works perfectly fine on the old Dell XP PC.)*

-When I plug in the external HDD to the new PC, I get a message saying "USB device is not recognized". Followed by "Device Driver successfully installed" message.

-HDD Does not show up in My Computer

-In Device Manager, it does not show up under Disk Drives, but an Unknown Device shows up under USB Controllers.

-In Disk Management, it does not show up at all, and there are no un-designated disks.

I have tried using different USB ports, no change. I have tried uninstalling the Unknown Device from Device Management, no change. I have also tried to find a driver on the hitachi website, but can't find the right one for this older drive. The drive is supposed to be plug-n-play.

There have been many similar questions on various forums regarding this particular drive, and all my research has yet to yield any solution to this problem. It seems that there might not be a working driver for this drive for Win 7, even though its supposed to be a simple USB plug-n-play drive. Before I give up and use another HDD, I thought I would ask here.

Any suggestions?

 

[matts6887]

Well; it is possible depending on how old the external drive is; that windows 7 may not support if it thew new pc is running 7. That may be why you cant get it to work.

 

[jumanji]

Try accessing your external HDD with a live Linux pen drive and copy the files from the external drive to wherever you want to copy.

http://www.sevenforums.com/software/198909-lucid-puppy-way-recover-files-non-bootable-computer.html

Download Lucid Puppy (Ubuntu Compatible build) lupu-528.005.iso (132.6MB) from

Download latest Puppy Linux release

You can create a bootable pen drive with that ISO using Rufus 1.4.7 (592KB) Rufus - Create bootable USB drives the easy way. Note: Backup all data on the pen drive for it will be lost during the formatting process by Rufus.

Boot from the pen drive with the source and destination drives in place and try to copy the files from source to destination.

Let us know whether this workaround worked.

 

[Frozwire]

There are few possible ways you can try to resolve your problem. You may try to update the BIOS firmware of the new PC and also try to update the chipset drivers in order for the USB controllers to communicate properly with the USB devices that are connected to its USB ports.