I have a WD500Gb MyBook. Most of back up has been from an XP system so it was all in NTSC. I have about 235Gb of data including my whole music collection (I don’t want to rip 1100 CDs again) and wedding photos so I have to get data back. However, recently I booted up an old Windows 2000 system and tried to back up some data. I didn’t realise that it changed the whole MyBook file format from NTSC to FAT32. My new built system is Windows 7. Is it possible to convert MyBook back to NTSC from FAT32 without losing the data?
Dude, not to sound negative but you CAN’T convert the file system of a drive without formatting… So if you were using XP and the drive is NTFS (NTSC is the Western TV standard), and then after using W2K the drive was FAT32 then it was already formatted… That, or Win2K reported a wrong file system.
If you mean that the drive is asking you to format it on W7, then it was going to happen anyway as either FAT32 or NTFS since XP’s NTFS is not clean enough for W7, resulting on W7 asking to format XP’s drives 8/10 times.
You can test this by connecting the drive back to an XP machine; the drive should be seen and the data recognized (If it was not formatted to FAT32 by Win2K). You’ll have to take out the data, then FORMAT the drive on Windows 7 so you can transfer the data from XP.
Sorry, should have said that I have an XP machine too and I ahave plugged the drive into that with same issue. Windows 7 doesn’t ask me to format. It just displays it as blank but when I click on properties it says that there is 235Gb used. The only work around I can think of is to build a Windows 2000 pc with a 500Gb drive and to transfer all to that from MyBook. Then to format MyBook and then to reload data and plug into Windows 7 machine, try and back up a small file and see what happens. Nothing to lose, apart from my privates when wife realises I’ve lost all wedding photos.
Numbers slightly wrong. It says 260Gb used space and 205 GB free space. If it had been formatted then surely it would not say that there was used space and free space - it would just say free space.
Be careful with this conversion method, it might corrupt your data, they say that is really rare, but if this data is not backup in any other place, I will not risked.
Reading the OP post, I really confused, he stated that his drive was used to backup his Windows XP computer, he connected the drive to a Windows 2000 computer to backup some data, now, how the Win 2k computer change the file system from NTFS to FAT 32 without erasing the data on the external drive?
I don’t think that the drive was formatted to FAT 32.
