sylviesinc said:
Thanks for this. My PC doesn't have a floppy drive and the article you
referred me to requires that you make a floppy then boot from it so I
don't
think I'll bother trying to convert my external HD after all.
sylviesinc:
First of all I assume the "external HD" you're referring to is a USB
external HDD. Presumably you're using (or plan to use) that device for
storage and/or backup purposes.
Assuming that is so, as a practical matter the only significant reason for
converting the present file system on the external HDD (I'm assuming it's
the "normal" FAT32 file system that most manufacturers install on their
external HDD devices) is to provide capability of copying/moving files onto
that external drive that are 4 GB or larger. The FAT32 file system cannot
handle those extremely large files, but the NTFS file system can.
While by & large the NTFS file system is considered a more efficient &
secure file system than the FAT32 one, that problem re the possibility of
establishing the 512 byte cluster size as a consequence of the conversion
process (rather than the more desirable 4 kb size) is really significant
(although you might even find some disagreement about this) where the HDD
involved is an internal HDD, e.g., your day-to-day working HDD.
The bottom line in all this is that there's really no harm in converting the
file system on your USB external HDD from its present FAT32 to NTFS using
the normal convert command as you indicated and in my opinion you needn't be
concerned over the possibility of creating 512 kb file clusters on that
external HDD.
Anna
