Hope this is ok to post on this forum-

I just got a new pc running Vista Home. I have a Lacie D2 Quadra external drive that I've had hooked up to a machine running XP Home. Had it for months, working off a IEEE1394b connection quite happily.

The Lacie is already formatted NTFS and has a bunch of files on it. I copied some files to from the old pc to the Lacie, then I hooked the Lacie up to the Vista PC.

I had the Vista PC powered down. Hooked up the firewire, turn on the drive, then turn on the Vista PC.

Vista PC says it knows it has a Lacie D2 Quadra attached to it. It's looking for a driver. The Lacie doesn't come with a driver. Vista says can't use this drive.

Under Device Manager, the drive shows up, and says it's using some generic Microsoft driver. It shows up as unformatted and uninitialized. Lacie doesn't show up in Windows Explorer with the other drives.

My Maxtor drive had a similiar message (cannot find driver) but it shows up in my list of drives.

Anyone else experiencing this? Can Vista really have such a hard time recognizing a regular ol' external drive?

I have used a Lacie 600GB Big Disk Extreme with Vista and it sometimes gets into an " please load in drivers for this disc" mode, but the drive should work without any drivers according to Lacie. I had to fiddle around(technical term) switching on and off the mains power to the device , waiting, and experimenting with different timing of connections of usb cable. I cant remember what order of connecting solved it but it seems stable for now.