Windows 7 Installation destroyed external hard drive

[TimTDP]

Before upgrading from XP to 7, I made backup on 2 external drives. I tested both backup, and they tested fine.
I then reformated my laptops hard drive & installed Windows 7. No problems were reported.
However I could not access the data on the 2 external hard drives. Windows 7 reported that they were unreadable and that I needed to reformat them!
The 2 hard drives were connected to my laptop when I installed Windows 7
I had to take both too a comuter geek who spent 2 days recovering my data - at a huge cost to me.
I am not impressed!!

 

[coolfire]

Hi, sorry to hear about your predicament. Though you had to pay someone to recover your data, at least it was recovered.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe the general advice around here when installing Win 7 is to install / upgrade with the bare minimum hardware connected to the CPU, i.e., mouse, keyboard & monitor.

 

[gregrocker]

The only possible cause for this that I can imagine is that you accidentally formatted the externals. Windows 7 installer has no other way to get into them.

Did you try plugging the externals into another Vista computer to see if it was readable at all?

Was it fiiles or image that you backed up?

What did the data recovery geek tell you what caused it?

This is another reason to unplug all but the target drive(s) during installation.