External Hard Drive NTFS or Fat32?

[jpw2ch]

I have an external Hard Drive that is partitioned into two partitions. One is NTFS and the other is Fat32. My main goal for this drive is to store XP Ghost images. I don't think I am understanding the file system thing so could someone explain. Should I have just formatted the hard drive with NTFS? Is there any advantage to splitting the hard drive in half? Should I convert the Fat32 partition back to NTFS? Once the data is removed from the external hard drive does it really matter if it was fat32 or ntfs?

[fink]

Unless you were someday planning to access the drive with Windows 98 or some older Windows OS which can only read FAT32 I can think of no reason to have any of the partitions formatted as anything but NTFS. It's more secure and is a more efficient file storage format. As far as splitting it in half, if you're only using it to store images then having two partitions would be of no advantage.

In fact it could be a bit of a disadvantage if one of the ghost images was say 4Gigs and you only had 1-3 Gigs of space available on one partition. That would be wasted space since you'd need to put the image on the next partition and presumeably leave those 1-3 Gigs unused.

[jpw2ch]

Okay so now that I have two partitions, one fat32 and one ntfs can I change the fat32 to ntfs now?

[SuperSparks]

Go to the Command Prompt (All Programs>Accessories) and type "convert X: /fs:ntfs" without the quotes, where X: is thge drive letter of the partiion that you want to convert. If the FAT32 partition was created using WinXP then that is all that you have to do. If the partition was created using anything other than WinXP, read this article, otherwise you can end up with 512 byte clusters, which isn't good for performance:

Converting FAT32 to NTFS

[jpw2ch]

Thanks for all your help.