WD MyBook 500GB: capacity question

WD External Drives External Drives for Mac
1

Hi, 

I am not the most technical person so when i purchased my new MyBook I did not re-format it to OS extended Journaled, I understand that MS-DOS (Fat 32) is acceptable for my powerbook but i have no future need to share the drive with a pc.

I have just bought a Seagate 320GB Expansion portable drive as I couldn’t get my hands on a WD portable soon enough for my needs, I have formatted that drive as OS Extended Journaled and all is fine, however when trying to use both Carbon Copy Cloner or Super Duper to clone my MyBook HD it tells me as it is formated as MS-DOS (Fat32) it will not run HFS+ files.

I have done the old drag and drop of all my files/folders I wish to keep including system files such as autorun, documentation, memeo, recycled, system volume information etc which i don’t know is necessary or not. My main problem is all the folders copy across fine by the look of things but I have 290.41GB on my WD MyBook and when copied over it is only showing 283.44 on my Seagate…I am wanting to re-format my MyBook to set up my time machine but don’t want to do it until I am sure all of my files are copied over…

Can anybody help please?

Many thanks for taking the time to read this.

Cheers

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Here is a suggestion:

a. Plug both drives to a computer.

b. Open finder for each drive and place the screen side by side.

c. Manually comparing each file one by one.

    Pay attention to something is not the same,

    then you may go back and do the copy again

This may take some time but it could be worth it.

If you can Google for some free software that can compare it that would be nice.

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Thanks for that, I have now discovered that  the difference is most likely due to differences in the file systems. FAT32’s “slack space” or large clusters  is assuredly larger and therefore it’s a safe bet that a FAT32 system would report more used space than HFS+(OS Extended Journaled) even if the same files were on each.