NTFS/Fat32

[John]

Hi,
I just inherited a hard drive and want to fit it as additional storage
to my PC. The disk is formatted as NTFS while my system is fat 32. Will the
drive be recognised and can I use it or must I format it as Fat 32?
John

 

[Oli Restorick [MVP]]

If you are using Windows NT, 2000 or XP (or above) then it will be
recognised and readable regardless of the filesystems on any of your
existing disks.

Regards

Oli

 

[Phil Barila]

[Text reorganized for logical flow]

If you are using Windows NT, 2000 or XP (or above) then it will be
recognised and readable regardless of the filesystems on any of your
existing disks.

One caveat applies here: If it's an old NTFS and you are attaching it to a
newer system, it will be silently and permanently upgraded to the version of
NTFS your system is using. If it's a newer NTFS, and you are attaching it
to an older system, the older system will be able to read and write it, but
chkdsk won't work, so you will not be able to fix any FS errors that exist
or occur in the future. If this is your situation, you would be better off
reformatting it in the system you are attaching it to.

Phil
--
Philip D. Barila Windows DDK MVP
Seagate Technology, LLC
(720) 684-1842
As if I need to say it: Not speaking for Seagate.
E-mail address is pointed at a domain squatter. Use reply-to instead.

 

[John]

Thanks Folks........much obliged.

 

[R. C. White]

Hi, John.

After you physically install the old drive (cables, jumpers, etc.), go into
Disk Management. (In case you haven't found this new-in-Win2K utility yet,
the quickest way is to type at the Run prompt: diskmgmt.msc)

Be sure your new inherited drive shows up in Disk Management. Look in the
Help file under "foreign disks" for instructions on how to move that drive
to your computer. Usually it's no big deal, but you may need to initialize
the drive in its new home. There is a LOT of good information about hard
drives and file systems in this Help file; you might want to spend some time
studying this and the Disk Management snap-in. You can change the View of
DM to suit yourself; I like to see the Volume List on top and the Graphical
View on the bottom, but the choices are yours.

If you like, Disk Management will be happy to reformat or even repartition
that HD for you, with one restriction. MS has decided that DM cannot be
used to format a larger-than-32 GB volume as FAT32; if you want a larger
FAT32 volume, you will need to format it in Win9x/ME (up to about 127 GB),
after which Win2K will happily use the whole thing. Note that this is per
VOLUME (primary partition or logical drive in an extended partition) and
there can be several volumes on a single HD. You can also use DM to
permanently assign drive letters to the volumes on your old and new HDs and
CD/DVD drives so that Win2K won't try to shuffle them each time you add or
remove a drive or volume and reboot. Win2K is quite happy to transparently
"mix and match" the various flavors of NTFS and FAT.

If you have more questions, just read a few dozen messages here. Similar
topics get discussed several times a day, it seems.

RC