08-16-2010, 01:10 PM

I recently bought an external hard disk MyBook Studio Edition II for my iMac desktop. I had followed the instruction on the link below

How to install, partition, and format a WD drive on Windows (7, Vista, XP, 2000) and Mac OSX


to make partition for my XP OS and Mac OS(My computer has 2 OS) . So, I suppose I can open my file in my external HD from XP OS or Mac OS side. But when I opened XP OS, window cannot detect the external HD. Then, I go to my computer-->manage-->disk management and make partition using all the space in the External HD. Then I try to open the HD but it need to be formatted. So, I scare that I will formatted all the Mac file inside. Then I go back to MAc OS and open the External HD. But in result, Mac cant detect the external HD.

(Priority)What should I do to save all the files? Or can I format first then find data recovery software for MAC to recover all the files in MAC OS?

08-16-2010, 06:21 PM

If you created a partition on the WD MyBook to take up the entire drive, there's no longer any data on the drive. Formatting will not make any difference.

To use the drive with both Mac OS X and Windows XP, you will either need to format it as FAT-32 or use a third party driver. If you format the drive as NTFS, you'll need a driver for OS X. If you format the drive HFS+, you'll need a driver for Windows XP. What do you want to do?

Regards.