Windows 7 too eager to format HD?

[oldsalt19]

Every since I upgraded my duo core Intel machine to Windows 7 from Vista, the new OS has offered a number of times to format one of my hard drives (which already contains lots of data), Not only is this annoying, but possibly dangerous to my data if I'm particularly fuzzy or inattentive. Any comments?
Oldsalt

 

[EXCellR8]

i've never encountered a problem with Windows 7 wants to format a hard drive... what happens, exactly? is there some kind of balloon on the taskbar or a window that pops up? this notification could probably be disabled somewhere but i have no idea where, possibly disk management?

perhaps there is some left over Vista partition information on said drive which 7 wants to convert, but that's going out on a limb. i guess if you performed an upgrade instead of a full install there might be some bugs, but i can't seem to find any information on this issue. if the drive in question is a secondary storage device, it could be configured incorrectly. can you access the files on the drive?

 

[oldsalt19]

Thanks for answering. As I think and write about this, I increasingly suspect that this may be related to my poor computer skills and habits.

A dialogue box appears midscreen claiming something similar to:

Drive:\G needs to be formatted before use.
Format now?

The drive in question, however, is always already formatted and has accessable data already on it and otherwise acts normal in any way. I'm not sure if it is always the same drive (eg G:\) One thing that may be connected is that it is usually a USB drive plugged into a hub. Cheap Belkin hubs seem to be all that is offered at our local stores. Perhaps extra effort to mail order better hubs would help. Often one of these drives re-initializes and "auto-reads" at the slightest touch of the particular hub--such as plugging in a thumb drive to that hub. Perhaps I should

1. Make sure that such drives are always connected directly to the computer rather than a hub?
2. Make the extra effort to obtain better hubs. What do you all like?
3. Spend a bit of extra money and get and use firewire rather than USB 2 anyway. The improvement in speed would probably be more than worth it at any rate.

I may well deserve some bashing on this one. Perhaps this post can be useful to others as an example of the wrong way to go about things.

Thanks again

Old Salt