Seagate external hard drive - failure to operate / OS issue

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Westgolf

Registered User
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Hi all,

I recently purchased a new fujitsu laptop. With my previous HP laptop i used a seagate external hard drive as a backup storage device. I backed up regularly and stored the drive remote from the laptop. The seagate unit is setup in such a way that I just plug in to the usb and let it work away. My problem now is that when I plug the seagate into the new laptop I get an error message stating that seagate cannot open under this operating system.

How do I go about solving this issue, Do I need to down load a driver or a fix patch ??

Any and all suggestions welcomed

westgolf

Edit note : this is a fail to operate once installed problem.

Leo , AAM will not let me access the thread title to expand it as requested
 
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More information about the model/version of the laptops and operating systems used would probably be helpful.
 
Have you moved from Windows XP to Windows 8.1? How were you backing up your data? Were you physically copying and pasting files or folders to the drive or were you using some third-party backup software? If the latter, you may need to reinstall the software. How is the external drive formatted? FAT32 or NTFS?

An alternative would be, if your original laptop is still working, is to reformat the Seagate drive with your new laptop (i.e. erase everything), then plug it into your old one, move the files on to the protable HD and then see if the new computer reads it.

Ultimately, if a computer can't read an external drive it is generally a) the hard drive is failing b) the USB cable is faulty or c) the drive has become corrupted.
 
Not quite, but I've fixed it for you (for reference, you need to go into "advanced mode" to edit the title of a thread).
Westgolf said:
The seagate unit is setup in such a way that I just plug in to the usb and let it work away.
Click to expand...
This suggests to me that you may have been using Seagate's own proprietary backup software, which allows for such automated backups — the one that came bundled with my own drive is called FreeAgentDesktop; it only works with Seagate drives, though.

Perhaps your new Fujitsu laptop simply needs this to be installed, rather than having a problem with the change of OS per se? (which you still haven't clarified, but I'm guessing you moved from WinXP to Windows 7 or 8). The installation file would have been stored on your hard drive when you bought it, but if you don't have it anymore you can download it from their website here). If the version you had before is very old, it's just possible that it's not Win7-compatible and that installing a newer version will solve the problem. Alternatively, of course, you could just format the drive (once you've moved your files elsewhere) and use Windows own backup feature (much improved from WinXP) or any number of free utilities.
 
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