External hard drive not recognized
I purchased a Buffalo Drivestation 1TB USB 2.0 External Hard Drive inApril of this year with no issues. I had 150 GB of data stored on myhard drive used with my laptop running Vista. Two days ago I copieddata via a different pc running XP, onto my hard drive. Added data wasalso circa 150 GB. The transfer took over 4 hours, there were no errormessages and I had confirmation once the transfer was complete. Sincecopying this date I have attached my hard drive to my laptop, howeverit is now not opening, and only showing that there is a drive pluggedin, it displays the driver in device management, but in MY Computerthere is no detail only showing as drive G. In Device management isstates that the device is working correctly. On the first instance Ihad an error message ‽error parameter is incorrect” I rebooted and thesecond time I was asked to reformat the hard drive before I canproceed. Please advise, as I do not wish to lose the data on the harddrive.
Computers & Internet - Buffalo Technology
Answers & Comments
Some of the externals have mapping issues in Windows. Although the TB shows in devices, you may need to remap it (right click on My Computer for mapping options) and in some cases, changing the drive letter will fix your problem. There's really no 1 definitive solution for these. If you're unable to fix the problem by remapping or changing the drive letter, you can partition the drive to recover your data. As far as the slow transfer rate goes, almost all externals are formatted in FAT. This has issues of its own with safely removing devices and slow transfer rates. I prefer to format my externals and flash drives in NTSF for more reliability. Best of luck.