How do I make my Western-Digital external USB hard drive work on Vista?
Q. Hello, I have two 120GB Western Digital dual-option hard drives, and since I’ve installed Vista they don’t work. Vista gives me a balloon that says the devices have malfunctioned and need to be replaced. However, they work PERFECTLY on my MacBook Pro and also on a different computer running Windows XP.
Is there any trick to making this work? Please no comments on “Vista sucks”. I’m already well aware.
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Try this :
Backup the data on one of the drives & reformat it (fully on another PC (try NTFS).
Then connect it to the Vista PC while it is powered off …that may work.
Sometimes Vista responds illogically due to the nature of data or file structure on a drive.
regards,
Philip T
just reformat it in ntfs and reconnect to pc. it dont need any driver.
Vista has updated file system drivers that may be more security consious then older windows systems, and if your hard drives partitions are not perfect (ie. if windows didn’t format your drives) Vista probably assumes that if they try doing anything with the drives they’ll just mess them up. This happens more often with NTFS formatted hard drives, so if you don’t need the added security and incompatability of NTFS I would recommend never using it. In any case, if you copy the data off the drives and repartition and reformat them with Vista and then copy the data back they might work.