external harddrive xp will not play on win7

I have a noontec sunlite u235 external harddrive purchased in 2006
will not play on my windows 7 when connected is says to use this product i have to format the drive. If i do this i will lose all i have downloaded when i want to recover all the files. Is there a download that i can update the driver .I have tried this ext hd
on another xp hoping they can download the files for me. but still does not work.hoping someone can help.

 

If you go into Computer > Manage> Disk Management in the XP machine does it say that the drive is formatted NTFS?
Do the same in Windows 7 and see if it still says NTFS (the others might be Fat32 or RAW)

 

windows7 says device is installed but it is not recognised in the device manager.I am 77 and not really familiar with all the pros and cons. I do not have access to an xp at the moment. donelle

 

Is it shown in 'disk management'.

 

no

 

Check it on another comp with the same OS,also on a comp that has xp,if it fails on all get a new housing or remove hdd & place it inside the comp as a slave

 

just wondering why you haven't got back to me

 

I agree with scorpNZ.
Your Win 7 PC knows that it's being connected, but it seems there is a problem with the drive because it thinks it's unformatted.
Ideally you would re-connect the drive to the machine that recognized it and get the files off.
It's possible that if the drive could be removed from the housing and mounted in the new PC that it would see the files.
Why can't you connect it to the XP machine - is it because it is now running Windows 7?

 

win7 is a bit stupid when it comes to drives built on other os .. i have seen it point blank refuse to have anything to do with drives which work perfectly on another os on the same hardware.. plus it's "format" is totally rubbish.. it didn't even manage to kill a slackware installed bootable drive even after partitioning and formatting using that joke "device manager" thing.. slackware would still boot.. hahahaha .. more trash from microsux

Try booting puppy linux from cd.. then mount both drives and see how suddenly everything is there and accessible. If you have space on the internal drive transfer your files.. (read the puppy wiki for how to do all that) .. if no space then you are in the land of working out how to deal with "broken by design" proprietary faulty software.

 

didn't think it would last,re:..comment i saw you post sometime in the last day or so about being nice.i was wondering if you were feeling alright it had me worried

 

varnull will know the dissing i'm talk'n bout not sure you do

 

My Win 7 has no problems recognising other drives including fat formats
probably either the drive or the enclosure has failed
putting the drive into the computer and then running a program like 'getdataback' from runtime will let you get your data back if the drive is readable

 

Something like partition Master will show if the drive is present and if drive space has been allocated.

Even with Win7 if another drive has the same drive letter windows in some cases will not recognize it. If that is the case assign the external drive another letter.

Hint: Google Fosi.

Jeff

 

i do not have the xp laptop any more

 

why haven't you removed the hdd from inside the housing & connected it to the pc directly also try what ps355528 said download puppy burn it to cd then reboot comp leaving cd in tray,it will boot into a desktop (live cd),then attempt mounting drive,you will also need to try a known working usb cable & power supply then another housing,not discounting these will be a waste of our time including what i said in my first paragraph