Zip files - FAT32/NTFS is Conversion Required?

[richs_radios]

Hi,

I have an old PC running Win NT 4.0 which has an internal SCSI 100Mb
Zip drive and disks. I now have a new PC with Win XP Home to which I
have added an external (parallel port) Zip 100Mb drive to copy over
files. The external Zip drive is recognized by Win XP (hardware check
is OK) and I downloaded the latest driver from Iomega as well.
The new PC can't read the Zip disks from the old NT box - it keeps
asking me to insert a disk in the drive (which I already have).
Is this because the old system (NT) uses FAT32 and the new one (XP)
uses NTFS? If this is correct how can I get the files moved over - is
there some conversion utility? If this is not the solution what else
might work?
I found some online references to a Win XP file transfer wizard but
have not found it on the new system (yet - still learning my way
around XP). TIA

Rich

 

[Robert Moir]

Hi,

I have an old PC running Win NT 4.0 which has an internal SCSI 100Mb
Zip drive and disks. I now have a new PC with Win XP Home to which I
have added an external (parallel port) Zip 100Mb drive to copy over
files. The external Zip drive is recognized by Win XP (hardware check
is OK) and I downloaded the latest driver from Iomega as well.
The new PC can't read the Zip disks from the old NT box - it keeps
asking me to insert a disk in the drive (which I already have).
Is this because the old system (NT) uses FAT32 and the new one (XP)
uses NTFS? If this is correct how can I get the files moved over - is
there some conversion utility? If this is not the solution what else
might work?
I found some online references to a Win XP file transfer wizard but
have not found it on the new system (yet - still learning my way
around XP). TIA

Well lets start with the easy one first. The files and settings transfer
wizard is in your start menu, under all programs, accessories, system tools,
or at least it should be.

As for the rest of it. Hmmm. Well NT never supported FAT32, only up to
Fat16, and NTFS. In any case, XP will support NTFS and any version of FAT
you care to throw at it, so any problems with file systems here would
actually be going in the other direction, if your XP machine formatted a
disk as FAT32 you could not then expect it to work on NT. Also, the format
of the hard disk the OS is running from doesn't matter, NT and XP will both
recognise and quite happily deal with any of their respective supported disk
formats no matter what.

So where does that leave us? If we're eliminating the disk formats as an
issue, I think we're left with a hardware problem. I'd try plugging the
parallel port version of the zip drive into the old machine and see if it
can read the old disks from there. Before moving it to try that though, I
would also try a brand new zip disk in it that has never been in the old zip
drive, and check it can read and write to that.

If it doesn't recognise a brand new disk and gives the same errors with that
then your parallel port zip disk, the newer one, is either out of order, or
at least has some kind of configuration problem.

If it recognises new disks and works just fine with those, but continues to
fail to recognise the disks used by the older zip disk, even after you move
the parallel port zip drive to the old machine, then I'd say a fault on the
old scsi zip drive is resulting in it writing disks which only it itself can
recognise. Should this be the case then with both drives on the same machine
you can copy the data from old zip disks to newer ones on the old machine -
tedious but at least it gets your data safely moved.

Regards

--
--
Rob Moir, Microsoft MVP for servers & security
Website - http://www.robertmoir.co.uk
Virtual PC 2004 FAQ - http://www.robertmoir.co.uk/win/VirtualPC2004FAQ.html

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