1st off I have a HP with a 80gb Samsung hard drive which is partitioned into two drives and two different type formats (Fat32 and NTFS) C: drive is 75gb and is formatted to the latest method of NTFS – program files are here, windows XP and internet junk, ect … D: Drive is formatted the old way with FAT32 and is like 5 gb and this is where my recovery part of the computer is – the program files are there. The drive makes some racket every know and then – its not bad yet but I think its getting ready to go. What I want to do is buy new Western Digital 120 gb, install it and copy everything from the Samsung to the Western Digital just as it is. Then remove the Samsung and install the Western Digital and I am going to hope that it would boot up with no problems. Well the questions are about the copy. Is there certain software needed to do that or is there a special DOS command to copy everything over – what I am worried about is the two different formats on my C and D drives – are they required to be that way – I know C has to be the new way of NTFS to handle larger blocks of data and faster searches and more files but I wonder what the reasoning behind them putting the recovery junk on D drive using the FAT32 format. Do you have any suggestions that might make this easer? I remember during the initial boot up of this HP and I had option to make one copy on backup DVDs of the recover programs incase something like this happened. I don’t really feel like having to reload all the junk I have on here over to there manually. Any help in performing the coping from one drive to another would be great. Thanks in advance. Timm
The drive will come with copying/image software (edit: unless you buy the "OEM" version). You should be able to just perform the copy with both drives installed, then set the new drive as the master (or, if it's SATA, put it in the primary SATA cable). 120 Gb WD drive? Hope you're getting it for $30 or less, seeing as 250 Gb Seagates are under $50. http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/Category/category_tlc.asp?CatId=8
Hey fellow...I have a question say you had a hard drive formatted at ntfs and you wanna change the drive to a Fat32 when install windows xp how you go about do that?
You have to do a complete reformat to go from NTFS to FAT32. Just put your XP installation disk in the CD drive, reboot, and select Install (as opposed to "Repair", etc.) when prompted to do so. If you don't want to change your partitions, then you can select "Leave partitions alone" and just reformat. You will be offered the FAT32 option. I change my partitions very slightly anytime I do a reformat only because I know the partition information will be re-written in case that had gone bad.
