PC wants me to format all flash drives

[gameover]

hi
I have a couple of WD external hard drives. On my laptop, they work fine. On my desktop, they don't.

the desktop was running vista (and had the same problems). I installed windows 7, hoping that would fix it (and tried it before it did any updates, and after updating itself) and still nothing. It installs the drivers for the drives, and the drives show up in computer management -> disk management, but nothing shows up in explorer. It says i need to initialize the disk (which will format the drive AFAIK)

If i put a usb flash drive (pen drive) into my laptop, it works fine. If i put it in my desktop it shows no files (can't even open it) - just says it needs to be formatted.

Any ideas whats wrong here?

 

[n1kunj]

You could just back up the files onto the laptop, format it on your desktop and then copy the files back.

Sometimes it's just less effort to do what it asks than work out why it's asking it

Of course, this may be bad if external drives>laptop drive.

 

[gameover]

I don't have 1tb of space on my laptop though (the 1tb drive is almost full)

I just plugged one of the drives into a machine running ubuntu (live cd) and got this message -



so it didn't work in linux. I didn't do option 2, but tried the first one (safely remove in windows) but that hasn't helped.

on my xp laptop it still works just fine...