formattedl drives/flash drives/sd card need formatting?

[cadtag]

One frustration I keep running into with Win 7 is the OS' desire to format most external drives and flash memory I connect. All of them work just fine if I boot into XP on the same box, use a different XP machine, or plug them into a linux box. just Windows 7 seems to feel the need to reformat the drives before using them.

Any suggestions on how to avoid that and force the 'puter to just work with the drive/flash would be welcome

[jaberwok]

One frustration I keep running into with Win 7 is the OS' desire to format most external drives and flash memory I connect. All of them work just fine if I boot into XP on the same box, use a different XP machine, or plug them into a linux box. just Windows 7 seems to feel the need to reformat the drives before using them.

Any suggestions on how to avoid that and force the 'puter to just work with the drive/flash would be welcome

FWIW, I've not had that with Win_7. ~shrug~

[Ed Jobe]

I get that a lot, well not format, but it tells you it needs repair. I just ignore it, but it is bothersome. I've had mixed results with flash drives. One I had, I accepted w7 and let it repair it, and then it wouldn't read it on xp any more. On another I accepted and it works fine on xp. Others I just ignore the warning. depends on if I need it to go back to an xp machine, which currently is my work pc. Shame too. I got a screaming workstation from Dell with 16gb ram installed and I can only see 3.

[BeKirra]

I don't have this problem.
What I can see is there may be 2 options:
1) Format your HD/repair your Win7, or
2) Format your flash drive

Did you run any AV scan for the entire system?

[cadtag]

AV -- yeah, it's been run, and there's nothing untoward on the drive. Every other device has no problems reading the filesystem properly. Fat32 for maximum compatability with other OSes. Can't reall.y format them, since it's the _data_ I want to read on the win7 box.

This seesm to be fairly prevalent issue, but no real identificatin or resolution shows up.

[jaberwok]

... Fat32 for maximum compatability with other OSes.

I format them as NTFS but then I've used only NT-based Windows since WinNT3.5.1

[cadtag]

there are supposed to be NTFS driver for Linux - but that doesn't help at all when I'm trying to move pictures off a flash card that came out of the camera onto my Win7 box. AFAIK there aren't any digital cams that use NTFS.

what a micky mouse arrangement - moving the Jpegs from a fat32 sd card onto linux via a card reader, and then reading off a samba share and copying onto the win7 system to edit, and then archive back across the lan to the linux machine. Or reboot into XP just to read the card on the same machine as the software.

Ironic that the 'free' software is more robust, stable, and reliable than the bought-and-paid-for ms windows. It bears out the philosophy that nothing worth doing was ever done just for money. The money may enable something, but it's passion that drives a worthwhile result. And too many managers at software companies have lost their passion, instead just keep going for the bucks.