My Book Studio wdbaaj0020hsl-- PROBLEM

WD External Drives External Drives for PC
1

I was sent a wdbaaj0020hsl by my our IT dept. so I could back up about 900 gigs of data from 2 pcs,  to send back.  I plugged it into a Windows 7 64-bit machine.  I saw all the WD software which I did not want to install, so I created a folder on the drive, copied over all my data.  Sounds simple enough…

When  connect it to another PC with XP on it, all I get is a CD drive with the software–no folder of data!  **bleep**!

I have no need to install any extra software on my new machine, especially bloated software that wants to partition or create CD images, etc. 

I simply want to plug the drive into a machine and copy files over.  I’m also curious if the folks on the other end will have the same problem when trying to acces the data.  

WHAT’s GOING ON?  It shouldn’t be this difficult to simply copy data— am I missing something?

2

The use of the software is optional, you should be able to copy your files manually from XP, as you did on Windows 7.  If you put the drive back to the Windows 7 computer, is still detected?

Make sure the drive has a  MBR partition and is formatted in NTFS.   Windows 7 has the option to create GUID partitions and also to format in exFAT, which both are not compatible with Windows XP.

3

How is the drive formatted now? In XP does the drive show in Hardware Manager and Disk Management?

Joe