Works in OSX-ML, not in Win7

WD External Drives WD Portable Drives
1

I have a customer that brought in his Passport drive because it shows up in Windows as a raw partition. Curiously, I am able to connect it to a Mac running 10.7 or 10.8, and the files are all visible. The drive is not locked as far as I know, becuase I can still access data from a Mac, and it does not ask for a passwordk.

The drive is formatted as NTFS, so the Mac sees it as read-only. Is there a utility or setting I can use to get Windows to recognize the NTFS partition that the Macs are able to see?

2

Have you tried backing up the data and reformatting on windows?

3

Something Like EaseUS  Recovery Wizzard http://www.easeus.com/resource/repair-raw-disk.htm might work. As a last ditch I have seen people use the command prompt to convert FAT32 to NTFS to fix this. Here is one http://windows7forums.com/windows-7-hardware/52429-hard-drive-unrecognizable-file-system.html

Joe

4

Did the drive work OK under Windows 7 until it was unplugged and then became unrecognizable when plugged back in to any PC ?  You may not know since it was a customer’s device.  Many people are having issues with portable drives that become unrecognizable after being unplugged.   Others have a totally different issue that the drive is unrecognized right from the gitgo. 

If it was never recognized  to start with on the Win 7 machine, there is a good chance the customer lacks adequate power via the USB port.  This apparently happens more with people plugging newer USB 3.0 drives into USB 2.0 ports, etc. You can readily test for that by using one of the branched USB cables (or a transformer powered hub)  that provides extra power to the device. If that fixes the problem, you know you had an inadequate power issue.

OR …

If it was recognized and worked fine but then was not recognized after that by Windows Explorer it was very likely hosed up when it was unplugged.   With drives larger than 1TB in size (no idea why that limit) there is a widespread problem with unplugging them causing screwed up directories on the drive and then it becomes unrecognized. In those cases, trying enough times you CAN eventually reformat the drive and then everything works fine (but of course lost whatever you had recorded.)   This problem seems to be only with the larger capacity (over 1TB) drives. It can be avoided by using the Windows “Safely Remove” feature.   I had hoped we were beyond the days of having to do that but it has come back with these larger capacity portable drives.