Windows 10: Hitachi HDS72101 external drive not recognized

I've got two Hitachi HDS72101 1TB external drives that my new Dell XPS 8900 running Windows 10 won't recognize. The device manager shows the drives to be working properly and having current drivers.

My computer recognizes my new Seagate 5TB drive and my old Lacie drives (older than the Hitachis). I am able to see the Hitachi drives when I plug them back into my old Vista machine, an XPS 420, and thankfully I was able to copy files from the Hitachi to the Seagate. However, I still want to use the Hitachi drives as back-ups.

Is this a Windows 10 problem or a Hitachi problem, and is there anything I can do to work around it either way and get these drives working on my new machine? (I was unable to figure out how to contact Hitachi support.)

:)

 

Windows 10 made external Hitachi HDS72101 HDD unusable, unrecognized

My system (Performance PC custom desktop) came with Win7 working great. An external 1Tb Hitachi HDS72101 HDD is what I used as my major backup drive. Installed Windows 10 (winver 10.0, build 10240). Hitachi external HDD no longer recognized. Power off/on
HDD and it then was recognized, but ran impossibly slow, and was mislabeled as a SCSI drive. Tried rigmarole suggested on this Community page and elsewhere, didn't work. Used Chat Help, couldn't solve problem. She installed version 1511, she said it's the
latest. No improvement. I then updated Gigabyte motherboard drivers to Win10 versions. No improvement. I tried re-installing the original Win7 drivers for the Gigabyte motherboard (based on an online suggestion). This corrupted my system drive C: (a SanDisk
SSD) and the PC no longer would boot and could not re-install Win7 with my original install DVD! Drive was un-writable. I had to re-partition C: (using gparted) and then I could re-install Win7. Then I spend a day re-installing all my apps and the latest
drivers of everything. I had heard from a couple computer-savvy electrical engineers that Win10 was great, but I'm going to wait for a more de-bugged version, like maybe in 2017.

 

Win 10 and external solid state drive incompatable

Since upgrade to Win-10 I can no longer backup files to external Hitachi and Western Dig. External drives. On two HP and Acer 64bit machines.

deleted the old external usb drivers, rebooted, still won't recognize. Tried the win-10 backup software, but it doesn't recognize the drives are there.

open to suggestion. Only assist I could see by Microsoft is info on Win7/8

 

Hi JohnSF and welcome to Tenforums.

There could be a number of things going on with the Hitachi drives (although it's odd that this would happen to both, at the same time). Some things to try:
1. a different/better USB cable
2. check the USB ports for looseness/movement
3. Look in Device Manager Disk Management and see if they have drive letters assigned; if not, try assigning
4. it's possible the internal PCBs are going bad; removing the drives and replacing them in new cases may solve the problem (using a SATA2USB adapter would prove this true/false)

Contact Us : Hitachi America, Ltd.

Glad you were able to get your data backed up! *Smile

 

I appreciate the Hitachi consumer contact info and have emailed them for info. The drives and cables are mechanically fine and still work when I plug them back into my old Vista computer. I was unable to figure out how to assign a letter to the drives, but I'll look into it further this evening.

 

Change, add, or remove a drive letter - Windows Help


I read that someone actually switched to a more robust cable, when having the same problem as you, and that resolved the issue, so thought I would mention it.

Hope Hitachi customer service can help you! *Smile

 

No help from Hitachi. My computer says the disks aren't initialized, but I know that to be false since they each have around 700GB of data on them, and the data shows up when I plug them into my old Vista computer.

 

*Sad

Well, since you've got your data off them now, why not go ahead and initialize them, to use with the W10 computer then? I would also check their health, just to be safe before depending on them.

Sorry I can't be of more help.

 

It's sobering to find that a new operating system can essentially render your external hard drives useless.

 

Where did you get those 2 Hitachis from? Sounds to me that the 2 drives are in RAID configuration. You may need to disable RAID first before you can use them as regular drives.

 

I never set them up in a RAID config. I did my back-ups manually. Both drives still work fine on my old Vista computer.

 

I was just wondering if you salvaged those drives from an old XPS pc and used them as spare drives. You seem to have a lot of XPS machines and from my experience, most XPS desktops are on RAID 0 (at least before SSDs went mainstream).
I recently encountered an issue with 2 salvaged 1TB drives from Dell XPS machine having problems with the computer I am working on only to realize later on that it was set to RAID 0.

 

I see. No, I bought the Hitachi drives new on Amazon some years ago. Interestingly, I can no longer find those drives. They seem to go under the brand name of Touro now. This is the closest thing I can find to what I have: http://www.touropro.com/en/product/t...pro/index.html. My drive boxes look exactly like this but say Hitachi instead of Touro, and they are also USB 3.0. Maybe they do have some built-in RAID architecture I never used or knew about. Unfortunately, I wouldn't know how to change that, or even if it could be changed.

 

Hi,

Could it be these were set up as dynamic disks on the Vista machine ?

Either way, W10 can't read the data off the drives because it's missing something on the ID header.

No biggie, as suggested before, copy or move the data to other media then reinitialize them on the W10 machine and so forth.

Cheers, *Wink