External drives not working in Win7

I have two USB external drive enclosures, a 3.5" IDE and a 2.5" IDE - I use both of them to troubleshoot hard drive problems, etc.

Neither of the drive enclosures seem to be working since I "upgraded" to Win7 - one of them seemed to work for a moment but stopped working quickly. Neither drive is recognized, although I do hear the 'device recognized' sound when I plug them in.

Is there something about Win7 that might be causing this? The 2.5" enclosure is NexxTech and it appears that they've gone out of business. The 3.5" enclosure is CompUSA, but I don't find anything on their site about drivers, etc.

 

External storage devices should be recognised by Windows 7 and installed with built in drivers as they use the USB standard. The fact that neither drive is working but you hear the "plugged in" sound would suggest to me that they may need to be "initialized" in disk manager.

To do this, right-click on "my computer" and choose "manage". Authenticate if required and click on "Disk management/manager" in the left of the window that opens. Then scroll through the list and see if the devices are listed there. If they are and they say "offline" or a popup asks you to intiialise them, choose yes in the popup or right-click on the disk name (like disk0 or disk1) in the lower portion of the screen and choose "initialize".

If the devices are not listed there, then click on "device manager" on the left of the screen, in the same column as the "disk manager" was, and see if there are any ! or ? in the list. If there are, post a screenshot of the list here.

 

Well, this is weird. When I plugged the drive in, I heard the "recognized" beep, but didn't see anything in Disk Management or Device Manager. But when I took the drive to another PC, a laptop that's also running Win7 Home Premium, I got a message saying that the drive needed to be initialized, and I could see it in Disk Management. I initialized it, did a quick format and it works fine on the laptop; however, when I bring it back here into my office and plug it in, I get nothing. Also, the drive's making a clicking noise as if there's a mechanical problem - but again, this doesn't occur on the laptop. My other USB devices work fine on this PC - any ideas what could be going on?

 

Oh, I'm sorry, I didn't mention that my PC is running 64-bit Win and the laptops are all running 32-bit - could that be the problem?

 

No there should not be a problem using a USB device between 32 bit and 64 bit windows.
I can move a USB stick between windows 2K, linux, XP (32 bit) and Win 7 (64 bit) and it is recognizable and usable in all the different OSes.

You might want to remove the drive from the enclosure and attach it just using an adapter similar to this
http://images17.newegg.com/is/image/newegg/12-226-001-S01?$S640W$
just in case the enclosure is the problem.

 

That's EXACTLY the device I've been looking for! I just ordered an SATA drive enclosure, but this device would work for both SATA and EIDE - I just ordered one from Egghead - I'll let you know how things come out. Thanks -

 

Here's hoping it works perfectly on both hard drives.