Major Problems Converting FAT 32 To NTFS

[dazuk1972]

I'm having problems converting one of my external hard drives from FAT 32 to HTFS. It's a Freecom 160GB hard drive and I went to: http://www.microsoft.com/technet/pro...onvertfat.mspx and I followed the instructions to the letter that Microsoft claim this convertion is very easy. I think their help sucks because I got this that follows.



I'm fed-up with these FAT 32 hard drives that limit our usage where we can only use 50% of the hard drives. I've just formatted that hard drive so it's ready to convert and now I'm stuck.

Many thanks.

Darren.

[Chewy]

looks like it should be G: /xxxxxxx

if it's empty just right click on my computer and use manage/disk management

[dazuk1972]

looks like it should be G: /xxxxxxx

if it's empty just right click on my computer and use manage/disk management

Many thanks for the help. Also, sorry about this but somehow it did work without me being told. What my image says, it never told me it worked. I went to My Computer and I noticed my G-Drive as in my external hard drive had Freecom HDD(G was written in blue. I thought that was interesting and when I right-clicked and went to Properties I noticed it was now HTFS and the reason why the name of the hard drive was written in blue was because it was automatically compressed. When I uncompressed it, the name was written in the usual black.

Sorry about the false alarm and the same to others. It wasn't my fault because I was told it failed in other words. It was false results on the matter.

Many thanks.

Darren.

[Chewy]

I've just formatted that hard drive so it's ready to convert and now I'm stuck.

xp won't hardly let you ever format a drive that big as fat32????????

[olyteddy]

xp won't hardly let you ever format a drive that big as fat32????????

Windows won't, but Western Digital drives can be. I had a 120 GB external that I needed to have as an FAT and got the software from WD.

[dazuk1972]

It's OK now, I managed to convert my hard drive to HTFS. It works fine as well and it will allow me to compress my hard drive this time. That's another thing we can't do with FAT 32 versions and that's compress the disk space.

Darren.

[AhelpingHand]

If you take my advise, the best is to move your data from the fat32 to another drive, FORMAT the drive to NTFS and move your data back to the formatted drive. Because converting while having data won't get you the free space you'll have when having a formatted NTFS from scratch. Specially if you have much data on it.

[Chewy]

altho you might hose the data in the conversion or it might be badly fragmented, the space used would be the same, certainly safer to remove and reload