ddddaveeee

New Member
Joined
Jun 25, 2011
Messages
4
Hi

I've taken the HDD out of an old iMac and put it in a USB caddy. I use HFS Explorer to access it from my work XP laptop and can retrieve files off it easily.

I've bought a new Windows 7 desktop and want to do the same thing, however when I plug it in it's not recognised in Explorer. I go to Disk Management and it suggests I have to initialize it before it can be accessed, but I don't want to format it, just use HFS explorer to get some files off it. I didn't have to do any of this on my XP laptop - it worked first time as soon as I plugged the external drive in

Any ideas what to do?

Cheers,
Dave
 

Joe S

Excellent Member
Joined
Jan 12, 2009
Messages
3,793
Maybe the drive caddy and it's driver is not compatible with Windows 7.
Joe
 

Solution

ddddaveeee

New Member
Joined
Jun 25, 2011
Messages
4
Thanks folks - I also discussed this with one of my techie friends last night, who said the driver stack in Windows 7 is different than XP and issues like this are fairly common (i.e. caddy driver not yet updated to win7)

The easiest short term solution for me as it's a bit of a 'one-off' just to restore some old files will be to copy them to my XP laptop then transfer to my new desktop via flash drive.

I'd hoped there might have been a quick config tweak I could have done to access the files direct from my new desktop, as I'm not yet familiar with Win7, but happy just to transfer via my laptop.