Western Digital Fat32 Formatting
Dunno if I should start a new topic with this - but I purchased a MyBook Mirror Edition 2Tb (2x1Tb) drive. I want to be able to SHARE data between my XP laptop and iMac and I want it set to Raid1 (mirror) as I’m using it as a work drive and want the instant redundancy.The Mirrored drive was reformatted Fat32 off a Mac and you guessed it, XP recognizes it but it won’t assign a drive letter or browse the drive. After MUCH googling I’ve determined that I have to reformat Fat 32 on the XP machine.BUT - how do I do that and keep the drive’s mirrored setting? The Disk and Raid manager utilities in the mac version gave an option for Fat32, but the windows one doesn’t. If I format it using Windows, won’t it just give me a 2Tb Fat32 drive?To restate my question - What’s the process to set up a RAID1 (mirrored), FAT32 drive under Windows XP?TIA,John.
Fat Formatter
WD FAT32 Formatter. 3.5 on 11 votes. FAT32 formatter is a Windows program that was designed mainly to restore original factory FAT32 partiton for WD external drives. Partiton for WD external drives.: list out WD external drives., restore WD disk icon.
With a little help I seem to have answered the question:“How do I set-up a MyBook to FAT32, RAID1 (mirror) so that I can read and write on both Mac and PC?”Here are the steps - be prepared to wipe the drive clean.On the PC, use the Western Digital Disk Management Utility to format the drive as RAID1. (NTFS is the only option here under Windows).Using the XP Disk Management utility (under Computer Management), select the disk, initialize the drive, but DON’T FORMAT!3. Move to the Mac.
Use the Mac OS Disk Utility to format the drive to MS-DOS FAT32. Check to be sure you can read and write to the drive. Wierdness alert! Frsky smart port. The WD disk management utility may show the file system as HFS+, but double checking the Mac will verify that it is FAT32.
Check the drive on the PC.Please post if you’ve found this successful. I will be testing the drive with a boatload of data before relying on it, but it seems to be working fine after several reads and writes on both platforms. The capacity and available space are in sync.Good luck.