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General discussion

Simpletech/Vista Problem

by cleo_2341 Feb 17, 2007 4:49AM PST

Help needed.. I have Simpletech portable external hardrive (80GB) Model #SP-U25/80W (Designed by Pininfarina). My friend borrowed my portable drive then while it is connected to his PC, upgraded his OS from Windows XP to Windows Vista. He didn't format the external drive or do anything to it. From that time, the external drive can no longer be read from his computer. I tried reading the external drive using my PC (with Windows XP) but it cannot also be read. I also tried with another PC (with Windows 2000) but still cannot be read. The external drive when connected to any PC would have a yellow light meaning it has power then it also has a blue light meaning the PC is trying to read something from the drive. Can anyone help me how to fix this problem? I have been using the external drive for almost 5 months and have lots of important files and pictures.

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3 Posts
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There are many similar posts in the Sorage Forum
by VAPCMD Feb 17, 2007 4:57AM PST

on external hard disks. Have you reveiwed them or tried any of the possible solutions?

VAPCMD

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How is yours formatted? FAT32?
by SFdriveSaver Mar 20, 2007 4:34AM PDT

I had the same problem. I found out the drive needs to be formatted in the NTFS format not the FAT32 format. I had mine configured FAT32 so that it would be compatible with both windows 98 and APPLE, but vista does not like that.

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Simpletech problem on Vista needs NTFS formatting
by darrallpride Sep 23, 2007 6:58AM PDT

I just ran into the same problem: out of the box, the VISTA operating system recognized a new device (A USB MASS STORAGE DEVICE) was attached, but wouldn't show it as a local drive.

The solution came in the form of Seagate's Disc Wizard software which is bundled with their off the shelf hard drives, like you can get at Best Buy. (I think you can download it from Seagate as well, but I haven't tried or looked!)

Ultimately, after installing the Seagate software on the VISTA computer, you allow the software to scan for new drives under "Add New Drive". Even though it is a USB external drive, the software found it. It asked if you wanted to delete the partition that is already there. Do that, then install the unallocated space in a NTFS partion as a logical disk drive , as you probably won't be using this as a bootable unit. Then, when that process is done, your VISTA will see the attached drive, but you'd better format it by right clicking on the new drive in "COMPUTER" and finding the "format" menu item.

Maybe you can find a faster way to find it and format it, but I needed to have this Seagate utility to solve my problem. Good luck -dp

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