My external drive works fine with my windows XP laptop, bought a new PC with Windows 8.1 and it will not recognize it
I get this message when I check under properties.
This device is not working properly because Windows cannot load the drivers required for this device. (Code 31)
The specified request is not a valid operation for the target device.
If I plug it to my XP it works great. Any help or suggestions?
Welcome to the Community.
It is possible for the device drivers to be incompatible with Windows 8.1 due to its age. As a test, I’d recommend confirming if it works with Microsoft Windows 7 first. if it does then the hard drive should be formatted in Windows 7 to NTFS before attempting to connect it again once more to Windows 8.1.
Thank you for your response, I was thinking the same, but hoping there was a workaround to make it work on Windows 8.1 without having to transfer everything to a new drive.
