A search for long-lived charged particles reaching the muon spectrometer is performed using a data sample of 37 pb(-1) from pp collisions at root s = 7 TeV collected by the ATLAS detector at the LHC in 2010. No excess is observed above the estimated background. Stable (tau) over bar sleptons are excluded at 95\% CL up to a mass of 136 GeV, in GMSB models with N-5 = 3 , m(messenger) = 250 TeV, sign(mu) = 1 and tan beta = 5. Electroweak production of sleptons is excluded up to a mass of 110 GeV. Gluino R-hadrons in a generic interaction model are excluded up to masses of 530 GeV to 544 GeV depending on the fraction of R-hadrons produced as (g) over bar -balls. (C) 2011 CERN. Published by Elsevier By. All rights reserved.