Did I format and install XP the correct way? Help!

[me]

I was using 98se and I formated both patitions of my 250 gig drive
with Fat32 and installed XP. Once XP was installed I convert both
partitions to NTFS. Should I have started with NTFS before I installed XP?
Is there any harm or performance hit in the way I did it? Thanks.

 

[Ken Blake]

In

I was using 98se and I formated both patitions of my 250 gig drive
with Fat32 and installed XP. Once XP was installed I convert both
partitions to NTFS. Should I have started with NTFS before I
installed XP? Is there any harm or performance hit in the way I did
it? Thanks.

Unfortunately yes. You now probably have small 512-byte clusters
instead of the default 4K you would have gotten it you had
formatted as NTFS in the first place. Those small clusters entail
a performance hit. See

http://www.aumha.org/win5/a/ntfscvt.htm

 

[me]

In

Unfortunately yes. You now probably have small 512-byte clusters
instead of the default 4K you would have gotten it you had
formatted as NTFS in the first place. Those small clusters entail
a performance hit. See

http://www.aumha.org/win5/a/ntfscvt.htm

Ken,

How can I check cluster size on my drive? I have Partition Magic and
various other tools, thank you.

 

[Ken Blake]

In

Ken,

How can I check cluster size on my drive? I have Partition Magic and
various other tools, thank you.

One way is to write a one-byte text file from notepad, and check
available disk space before and after.

 

[Alex Nichol]

I was using 98se and I formated both patitions of my 250 gig drive
with Fat32 and installed XP. Once XP was installed I convert both
partitions to NTFS. Should I have started with NTFS before I installed XP?
Is there any harm or performance hit in the way I did it?

You may very well have landed yourself with 512 byte clusters, which is
not good news. Really you should have formatted as part of the XP Setup
(When it asks where, hit ESC and delete existing partitions to make new
ones). Do a run of CHKDSK (read only) and see what allocation unit is
indicated. AFAIK the only thing that claims to convert 512 to 4K as it
should be is Partition Magic 8.1