Formatting NFTS to FAT32

WD External Drives External Drives for PC
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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.

  1. On the PC, use the Western Digital Disk Management Utility to format the drive as RAID1.  (NTFS is the only option here under Windows).

  2. 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!  The WD disk management utility may show the file system as HFS+, but double checking the Mac will verify that it is FAT32.

  1. 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.