WD My Book Essentials 2TB switch from Vista to WIN 7

I have about 1TB of data on My Book Essentails 2TB used on a Vista computer. I want to now move the disk to a WIN 7 computer. The unlocker works OK but I cannot access the disk. The WIN 7 machine returns an error L:\ not available access denied. I tried to ‘take possesion’ as recommended in the Microsoft forum but that did not work. I can see the drive using ‘diskpart’ with the proper size but windows does not report the size in the properties dialog box.

WD tech support told me to reformat the drive…not what i would have expected from a storage manufacturer. The reason for external drives is transportable storage.

Did you try going into sharing and change sharing and permissions yourself? Try right clicking then propertied then share and give full access to Everyone. The sharing/permissions can be a real pain in Vista and Windows 7.  Using on different versions of Windows can cause problems occasionally. If you need the data off  it try burning a Linux Live CD and see if you can access the data after booting from it.

Joe

Joe, Thanks for your comments. Yes I went though the permissions but that did not address the problem. Have you ever used these drives without the Smartware? The guidance shows that the SES drivers are needed but they do not seem to install properly from the downloads avaliable. I will look into CD solution you suggested.

OK so I am a dummy! The users guide states not to use the drive as a portable drive. In trying to do so I lost the data. Fine now how do I get the drive back to original condition for use on the Win 7 machine?  Has anyone doen this before successfully?