Formatting and Restoring Hard Drive

[Scott]

I regularly image my WinXP and Win98 hard drives using Acronis 8.
I have a new external hard drive, which I divided it into two partitions...
one for NTFS and one for FAT32. I image my Win98 drives to the
FAT 32 partition. I see that Acronis divides the image into several
3.99 GB files. There can be several of them. On my older external
drive, I imaged the Win98 drives onto the NTFS formatted hard drive.
I never had any problem restoring back to a Win98 drive from the
NTFS drive.

I'm wondering if there's any advantage to restoring all those multiple
3.99GB image files to a Win98 drive that way?

It seems so much simpler just to have one file for each drive image.

Thanks!
Scott

 

[Leonard Grey]

The maximum file size supported by FAT32 is 4GB.

 

[Ken Blake, MVP]

I regularly image my WinXP and Win98 hard drives using Acronis 8.
I have a new external hard drive, which I divided it into two partitions...
one for NTFS and one for FAT32. I image my Win98 drives to the
FAT 32 partition. I see that Acronis divides the image into several
3.99 GB files. There can be several of them. On my older external
drive, I imaged the Win98 drives onto the NTFS formatted hard drive.
I never had any problem restoring back to a Win98 drive from the
NTFS drive.

I'm wondering if there's any advantage to restoring all those multiple
3.99GB image files to a Win98 drive that way?

It seems so much simpler just to have one file for each drive image.

Acronis has no choice. It is creating the maximum file size possible
for a FAT32 volume.

One of the many advantages of NTFS is that it doesn't have this
restriction.

 

[Scott]

Acronis has no choice. It is creating the maximum file size possible
for a FAT32 volume.

One of the many advantages of NTFS is that it doesn't have this
restriction.

Ken,

Yes, I understand that 4GB is the maximum for FAT 32. Do you see
any problem with imaging a FAT32 drive to an NTFS drive and then
having Acronis restore it back to the FAT32 drive? It seems to restore
okay doing it this way.

Thanks!
Scott

 

[Ken Blake, MVP]

Ken,

Yes, I understand that 4GB is the maximum for FAT 32. Do you see
any problem with imaging a FAT32 drive to an NTFS drive and then
having Acronis restore it back to the FAT32 drive? It seems to restore
okay doing it this way.

I don't know a whole lot about True Image's capabilities, but if you
say it can do it, I believe you.