Hi all, I know there's a massive knowledge base on here so thought I'd give you a try.. that and I'm desperate! basically decided to upgrade the old puter for photo editing work. New (to me) box, dual cpu's 8gb ram etc... bought Win 7 because Lightroom 4 will only work with Win 7. Wanted to upgrade because this has a feature not found in Lightroom 3.5.
Win 7 works great as does Lightroom 4 what doesn't is that it simply will not recognise my raided hard drives. There are loads of people on the net with similar probs in that 7 will not see external drives. I have 4 other external HD's which it sees fine but the one all my important work is on is a no-go! Tried just about every 'fix' found on the net to no avail. If I run XP on the new puter it finds it and works normally so it's not a hardware issue but no matter what I do 7 won't open it... it does see it but says it's RAW format not ntfs and wants to format it! Have you any ideas? Currently, gone back to XP and Lightroom 3.5 just to keep working... You'd have thought Microsoft would have got the hang of this sort of thing after Vista!

As a work around why not have both computers networked together then plug the drive into the xp pc, share the drive on the network then copy your files across to another drive that the win 7 pc can see

Is the HD your plugging in, setup to run as a slave ? on hard drives there are small pins , which if covered/uncovered can make the HD either a slave or a master.


I had one like this a while ago till I worked out the pins werent covered.

I have encountered this with hardware (card) raid systems on version upgrades on earlier, never found a cure since then I have avoided hardware raid altogether.

I could copy the files to another drive using xp, but that's not really the point.. I want to be able able to use a piece of kit I paid quite a lot of money for which has over 200000 aerial images on that works perfectly on any computer using XP, even Vista and Mac.. so why in heavens name won't it work with 7? Surely it can only be a bit of code somewhere and it really isn't acceptable that Microsoft keeps putting out flawed software and we all just accept it and end up buying more hardware or software or download patches etc just to get back to where we were ten years ago. Spent two full days buggering about with this only to have to load an operating system (xp) that's now over ten years old.. Progress eh?

Thanks for the suggestions guys

I've had this a lot.

Go to Start, type in 'Computer Management' in the text box a t the bottom and hit return.

In the left-hand column of the Computer Management Window select Disk Management.

You should see the external drive somewhere, right-click on it and select Change Drive Letter and Paths...

Select Add and assign the letter you want for that drive.

Once done, you should see the drive in Explorer.

HTH

JB