Dual booting - Windows 7 won't access external hard drive

Hello. I've been looking everywhere for information about this and haven't found it, so I hope you can help me.

I've just installed Windows 7 on my MacBook using boot camp. My issue is that Windows won't access my USB external hard drive, which is where I keep all of my music and movies. I know that Windows and OS X use different file formats, but I was under the impression that one of the drivers Boot Camp installs allows Windows to read Mac files, which seems to be the case since I can access all of my files that are stored on the Macintosh HD partition from the Windows partition.

Windows detects the hard drive as a USB device and even seems to know it's a hard drive. It just won't assign it a drive letter and allow me to access the files. Is there any way to force Windows to recognize it, or am I out of luck?

Thanks for your help.

I just tested this from Windows 7 to my external backup drive formatted to HFS+ and was able to read the drive without a problem as well as the MacIntosh HD. (I'm also using Snow Leopard.)

Have you opened up the Drive Management utility from Win 7 to check if you can assign it a drive letter? Give that a try and post back.

Regards.

I was able to assign it a drive letter in Disk Management and it shows up as an additional disk drive now, but when I try to access it is says that it has an unknown file format and recommends formatting the drive.

Rocklin said:

I was able to assign it a drive letter in Disk Management and it shows up as an additional disk drive now, but when I try to access it is says that it has an unknown file format and recommends formatting the drive.

Click to expand...

OK. At least you got the drive to mount in Win 7. That's a start. Why it's stating an "unknown file format" has me wondering if your external is using the GUID partition table and HFS journal format?

Boot back to OS X Snow Leopard and check the drive with Disk Utility for errors first. Then check to see if you have it set to use the GUID partitioning scheme and HFS journal format. The Windows driver installed by Snow Leopard appears to be a bit fussy - it's actually an IFS extension - so it may not be capable of reading other HFS or partitioning schemes.

Regards.

In all my tinkering around, I managed to make the drive unreadable in OS X as well as Windows. Time to reformat, I guess.

Thanks for all the help, anyway.