How to set up drive format for Win 7?

  • I purchased a pi 3 and was able to successfully install Openmediavault so that I could have file sharing on my local network using an external drive.


    I have been trying to follow the instructions I found online, but I am not able to mount the NTFS external hd. Should I format the external drive in a different manner that will work with Win 7?


    I am new to all this, so any details, instructions would gladly be appreciated. Thank you.

    • Offizieller Beitrag

    You want to move your hard drive between NAS and Windows 7 computer? OMV is not designed for this. You should connect your drive to the NAS, format it with ext4, btrfs or another file system, but not NTFS, and keep it permanently connected to the NAS.


    If you want to access files on the drive, use the network. That is, why it is called NAS.

  • Thanks. Well I hope the pi 3 is what I was after, after reading articles on the subject.


    Ok, here is what I am trying to do. I bought a new router in the hopes of using a usb external drive plugged into the router to save files on the external hd. Unfortunately, the external drive is bigger than the router firmware can recognize.


    So, after searching online, someone recommended getting a pi3 and installing OMV, plugging into router and using this to access the external drive on the local network. I set everything up last night, and can see the hd on the network, however I was not sure what format to use on the external drive so that I can mount it, and still have win 7 recognize the files. I hope this makes sense


    Basically, I am trying to set up an external hd on my local network so that this external drive can save data, back ups, etc. without taking up space on computer internal drive. Thanks.

  • If you leave the storage plugged into the RPi, which is a Linux machine, you need to format it with a Linux filesystem. The Windows machine is never going to access the drive directly. The RPi will be doing the reading and writing to and from the drive and will serve the files to the Windows machine over the network.
    So you probably want to choose ext4.

  • So if I format the external drive to ext4, I would be able to save my win 7 files to this new file type, and download them back to the NTFS system without any issues? Thx.

    Windows doesn't care about the filesystem. It doesn't see it, because the drive will never be attached to the Windows PC. The Windows PC never reads or writes to the disk. The RPi does.


    The drive is attached to the RPi, which runs OMV, which is Linux. The Windows PC only sees the actual files served by the RPi over the network, not the underlying filesystem.

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