external drive works on one PC but not on another

[tekwrite55]

I have an external hard drive that works on the original Windows 7 OS and hard drive where I added it. May be permissions issue? I think I had not shared it but share it now. I installed a second internal hard drive on the same PC with fresh install of Windows 7 but it either does not see the external drive or wants me to initialize it. I tried the external on another PC and it wants to initialize as well.

So I go back to the original windows drive and it finds the external drive. I have swapped USB ports and cables to no avail. The drive is a back up of another external drive.

 

[hang-the-9]

Did you maybe encrypt the drive? You can copy out the files using the computer it works on, then delete all partitions off the drive, create a new one and format it. See if it works after that on the other systems.

 

[tekwrite55]

Did you maybe encrypt the drive? You can copy out the files using the computer it works on, then delete all partitions off the drive, create a new one and format it. See if it works after that on the other systems.

Thanks but stupid me bought a player instead of a burner! When I used to build PCs all they ever had was burners so just assumed that is what it was.

 

[hang-the-9]

Did you maybe encrypt the drive? You can copy out the files using the computer it works on, then delete all partitions off the drive, create a new one and format it. See if it works after that on the other systems.

Thanks but stupid me bought a player instead of a burner! When I used to build PCs all they ever had was burners so just assumed that is what it was.

Are you talking about a CD/DVD drive here? Not sure what you are talking about now, an external optical drive does not need to initialize, it's just seen by the system then you can put the disks in. You seemed to have left out some information in the post. Are you just trying to burn an optical disk?

 

[RolandJS]

If you are using CD/DVD RWs with this optical drive, it will have be a burner as well. Continuing, if you are talking about using CDs, DVDs: unless I misunderstand, if you're planning to use explorer.exe on such RW media, such often has to be formatted first. If all you're planning to do is burn, no formatting necessary.

If you're talking about external usb platter-driven hard-drives, let us know, we'll try to help out.