I'm looking into upgrading from Win ME to Win XP. I'm doing conversions of home tapes to DVD's and want to avoid the 4gb limitation on file size with the FAT system. I've read that converting from FAT32 to NTFS during the Win XP upgrade process may give you 512kb clusters which degrade disk performance. According to this material, 4kb clusters are optimal. The only solution that the material I read mentioned was to buy a 3rd party software product (this wasn't an ad for the product & was a year old). Anybody have any more info on this? Can you select cluster size when running the XP upgrade disk upon doing the FAT to NTFS conversion? Do you convert to NTFS as part of the XP upgrade process or is it done seperatly? Or if it can be done both ways thne which way would allow you to ensure a certain cluster size?
csaag, You can convert to NTFS when you do a brand new Windows XP installation. During the installation you will be asked if you want FAT32 or NTFS so choose whatever you want. If you happen to set up FAT32 and decide to change to NTFS you can do so on the command prompt. When you convert to NTFS without specfying the cluster size Windows will select a default size depending on your hard disc's capacity. If your hard drive is more than 2GB then the default cluster size is 4KB. Here is a link from Microsoft which explains the cluster size defaults: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;314878&Product=winxp And here is another link explaining how to convert Windows XP from FAT32 to NTFS without having to do a new installation: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;307881&Product=winxp I hope this helps.
