Yet another external hard drive Windows 7 compatibility issue...

NickWhite

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May 31, 2011
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Hi, guys - I hope I'm posting in the right place...
I have a Western Digital Caviar Green 2TB SATA hard drive which was formatted in XP. It sits in a swappable hard disk enclosure which plugs in via USB. It works fine on my XP machine, and I can read and write to it.
Sadly, my Windows 7 machine recognizes the drive as an ATA/ATAPI bridge in the device manager, but I can't see it in the disk manager to assign it a drive letter (as advised on other posts on this forum.) It doesn't show at all.
I can't seem to find any fixes - any ideas what it could be? The drive is just fine on the XP machine, so it isn't a cable issue. Do I need to set jumpers or something?
I'm tearing my hair out here - hope somebody can help...
 

NickWhite

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May 31, 2011
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I fixed it! Just as I'd given up and decided to ask you guys, the internet coughed up a solution.

for those interested, I got this from Microsoft Answers...
Plug in and turn on the external USB hard drive.
Right mouse click on My Computer.
Left click on Manage.
Left click on Device Manager.
Expand the USB list.
Find the USB device for your USB Hard Drive.
Right mouse click – Uninstall.
Turn off the external USB hard drive.
Turn on the external USB hard drive and let it find and install the driver.

http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_7-hardware/window-7-is-not-recognizing-external-hard-drive/466a7dd9-8232-465c-b954-2838b9e18d9a