My Book - WDBBGB0060HBK-NESN 6TB - Format to Linux EXT4

Portable Drives My Passport
1

Hey gang!

I got the My Book 6tb for Christmas, and as I run a mainly linux network at home, I wanted to repartition the drive as two tb for exfat and 4tb for ext4 as a linux partition.

Gparted finds the active partition, but is unable to shrink it.

Windows disk management sees the partition but is unable to shrink it.

Is there something I’m missing here?

2

Hello,

I don’t know about linux, but for Windows you don’t want to “Shrink”.

You need an unactivated volume (Green or Free Space) that you want to divide and right click it. If is already active, you my have to Deactivate it or Delete it.

Right clicking an unactivated volume should give you a list of options to create various types of partitions, including New Simple Volume. Select an option and you will get a screen to specify the size of the partition. Continue to create and name the partition. Repeat for the second partition.

You can then format each partition.

I hope this helps.

Cliff

3

Hi Clifford,
I’m not interested in Windows disk management, but thank you for your response, although a bit late in my reply.

Right, so I’ve mounted the drive as exfat using the /etc/fstab on my raspberry pi. The first entry shows a normal ext4 formatted disk, followed by the My Book:

;proc /proc proc defaults 0 0
;PARTUUID=aafd5796-01 /boot vfat defaults 0 2
;PARTUUID=aafd5796-02 / ext4 defaults,noatime 0 1
;a swapfile is not a swap partition, no line here
;use dphys-swapfile swap[on|off] for that
UUID=82860975-6f22-4761-bc52-9dd205d36b95 /mnt/500gb ext4 defaults,nofail 0 0
;Western Digital My Book
UUID=F277-20D3 /mnt/mybook exfat defaults,nofail 0 1

Let me tell you this. Linux does not seem to like exfat, and I when doing large 2gb file transfers using rsync, i get transport endpoint errors all the time. Now I think that the best idea would be to format the drive for ext4 as I prefer it lives on a linux server as usb storage rather than flip between a windows and mac machine.

I’m still looking for a method of formatting this drive to ext4 if anyone can shed some light on that process.

Just for reference, rsync needs these switches to avoid copy errors to your new WD My Book:
rsync -vrltD --progress --stats /source/files /destination/

4

Hi,

I know this is a pretty old thread, but I’m facing exactly the same problem with a WDBBGB0080HBK-NESN (same model, 8GB).

So far I’ve been unable to format it to ext4.

Did you manage to do it?

Thank you.

5

No, I haven’t managed to change the format from ex-fat to ext4. I also ran into some fairly large overhead with exfat-fuse on the raspberry pi, so have reconsidered purchasing “boxed” drives from WD for this reason.