External drive works in Win 7 but not in Win XP

[Sammy]

Hi everyone Do apologise for not having logged on to the forum for a while. Haven't had a chance to create anything of worth

I have a computer related problem and am hoping that the experts on the forum will be able to provide the solution

I have a dual OS pc with Windows 7 and Windows XP Proffessional installed on it.

I bought a new unformatted 2tb hard drive with the idea of creating and using it as an external drive. So bought an enclosure and fitted the drive into it. All went well.

When I connected it to the computer via USB, at first, it did not show up in Windows Explorer. So I went into Disk Management, in Windows 7, and gave it the drive volume, drive letter and formatted it to exFAT. After that the drive was visible in Windows Explorer and I was able to copy and read files from it. It worked fine.

However, when I connected the drive under Windows XP, the drive is visible but I get an error message saying " This drive is not formatted, do you want to format it?" Under Properties for the drive, there is no volume or format information.

When I try to format it, there is an error message saying " Windows cannot format the drive"

The drive works fine under Win7 but has problems in WinXP.

I'll be grateful for any solutions or help. Thank you in advance.

Sammy

[Big Frank]

is your windows 7 64bit? if so your partition is likely to be invissble to winxp

maybe go to computer managaemnt on 7 and remove the partition
switch to xp and create the partitio(s)
i hope that helps

if not try this utility from gigabyte :http://www.gigabyte.com/support-downloads/Utility.aspx

[Sammy]

Thanks a lot Big Frank for your reply. Yes that was it, 64bit in Windows 7 was the reason. I did as you suggested and the drive works fine

Thanks very much again.

Sammy

[Big Frank]

a pleasure
nice when a plan comes together