Hey guys just wondering if i could convert my FAT32 Hard drive to a NTFS system without formatting or loosing any of the files.What im basicaly trying to do is to burn some files onto a dvd,but since these files are compressed and they are above 3.5GB they cant be extracted on my FAT32 HDD.SO can ny1 help me and give me a solution. N.B: Both my partions are almost full and cant afford to format them.Nor do i have an external HDD.
If you have Windows XP, there is no problem doing it if you have room on the partitions. In your case, is appears that you really need to get a larger hard drive or get rid of some of the junk that you have on your current hard drive. Converting the partition is a piece of cake and does not require formatting/losing data. It does require some room, however. No matter what you decide, if you have less than 10% free space on your hard drive, you are going to soon start to run into major problems in operation of your software applications.
Hi ashmat, You said 'both my partitions'. The advantage for you is, you can convert your second partition (the non-Windows one) to NTFS easily, simply to work with the large files or whatever. Clean up your Windows drive heavily; empty the Browser cache (make sure it's set to ~30MB) and manually clean out both your Temp directories, and recycle bin. Reboot. Then copy as much stuff off the other partition as possible, or burn it, or toss it, whatever. Just clean it up until at least ~50% free, then convert to NTFS. Typically in an original NTFS installation, your HD would have been done all 1 big partition. With NTFS drives you should run 'diskcheck' now & then, maybe once/month, which will inform you requires reboot :^) You can then look in Event Log to see what was done to the NTFS volume. Hey ashmat, brand-new top-quality drives like WD 80GB/8MB are dirt-cheap, like $49 bucks or something. So take a look at that (in many ways, 2 small harddisks are better than 1 big one when you're working with large video files and ripping/encoding/transcoding etc.) Howzit going Bruce, Regards
To "The_OGS" As i have mentioned"Both my partions are almost full and cant afford to format them."I think you miised the point about what i was trying to convey.Both the partions are almost full and im not looking forward to a format untill i get these files writen on to a DVD. Nyway Thanks GrandpaBW for ur advise.Im looking forward for more steps on how i could do this if i have 10% free space in my HDD.
You are better off to get a new, larger hard drive to copy your files to from the existing partitions. You can then convert the partitions to NTFS with no problems. If you don't get a new drive and are not going to dump some of the junk that you have on your existing partitions, then you don't need to worry about converting to NTFS, because you aren't going to fit any 3.5GB files on the partition, anyway.
ashmat, you're not reading correctly. Nobody said anything about formatting - I said clean up your partition and convert it! It will take ~60 minutes to write some DVDs - why then are you Let me save you some time, stop looking - it can't be done. You cannot even defrag a drive with 10% free... Many people with questions have challenges with writing, but we assume you can read, LoL Good luck
You can convert your drive to NTFS from FAT32 easily without formatting if you running windows XP: Start>Run>Type "cmd" press enter>type "convert (the drives you want to convert) NTFS" and it will convert the whole filesystem to NTFS I don't think there is much of a risk as i read on the Windows site about this a while ago... Don'f follow my instrutions word for word though as i think the convert bit isn't right but good place to start research on it.
Exactly - easy! And it's no big secret. You can upgrade harddrives from Basic Disk to Dynamic Disk from Disk Management within Computer Management, and I believe you can convert FAT32 partition to NTFS through that interface too - you just need to free up some space.
