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external drive is working in win7 but not xp

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i have a 500GB seagate external drive and until recently it was working fine. I used in on win 7 and it asked if it should fix the HDD. Without knowing the consequences i gave yes. After that it works fine on the win7 system but when i open it in xp it says

d: is not accessble.
the file or directory is corrupted or unreadable.

Please tell me how i can make this work on xp safely. Is there any fix to this?

Topic

If it still works on windows 7

In reply to external drive is working in win7 but not xp

plug it in, copy everything off the drive, then format the drive (if you are just going to use it with windows computers running 2000 or later, format it to NTFS. if you are going to use a variety of computers choose FAT32), then copy your data back onto the drive.

This has been something I have seen happen a few times with windows 7. It starts if you do not safely remove your drive from a computer. computers sometimes delay writing files onto the drive, until the system is idle, to save processing power for what you are doing, so if you pull out the drive, it can sometimes corrupt files, safely removing the drive will force a write, making sure it is all up to date. these corruptions are what windows 7 wanted to fix.

Secondly

In reply to If it still works on windows 7

this post should really have been in the Questions section. 😉

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