Backup to external hard drive

[Guest]

I just got a Seagate 160 GB External USB hard drive. It is formated FAT32.
Can I use the windows XP utility to backup to it? My data backup would be
about 8 GB so I would need to have the backup in several files due to the
FAT32 file size limit.

Thanks

 

[Carey Frisch [MVP]]

Use Disk Management to reformat the USB drive to NTFS since
one cannot create a file larger than 4 GB on a FAT32 partition.

How to use Disk Management to configure basic disks in Windows XP
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/309000/en-us

Limitations of the FAT32 File System in Windows XP
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314463/en-us

--
Carey Frisch
Microsoft MVP
Windows - Shell/User
Microsoft Community Newsgroups
news://msnews.microsoft.com/

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:

| I just got a Seagate 160 GB External USB hard drive. It is formated FAT32.
| Can I use the windows XP utility to backup to it? My data backup would be
| about 8 GB so I would need to have the backup in several files due to the
| FAT32 file size limit.
|
| Thanks

 

[Admiral Q]

Suggest you reformat the drive NTFS - then you can have 1 file per backup,
and know the backup is on a more robust file system, able to better
withstand a power failure with corrupting the file, that is unless it is
being written to.

 

[Guest]

I just bought the exact same drive for My system...but the disk manager
wouldn't
work at all in the MMC aplet. Strangely enough, Diskpart worked perfectly
from the
cmd window {aren't these two the same program in different interfaces??}.
Anyway, I deleted the single "whole-drive" FAT32 Partition and created two
primary partitions - one FAT32(20gb), one NTFS with an Extended Partition
encompassing the remainder of the drive. That allowed me to create as many
Logical Drives as I wanted for whatever purpose I might need. Can you imagine
how long it would take to defrag a 160gb drive all at once?? I suggest you
break
it up into manageable parts for that reason alone.
Just My 2 cents.

MsLLL

 

[Guest]

Thanks,

I partition the drive 10 GB for FAT32 for my wife's old machine so we can
backup her documents and then converted the rest to NTFS.

Thanks for all your help.