PCA Forums

I have a WD 20 gig HDD in my work computer. It's split into two even partitions, both FAT32 (XP Pro).

Is there any way to go back to 1 partition without losing my data?


This is the reason I am asking this:

I just ordered a WD 80 gig HDD to be used as the 2nd HDD on this system. I plan on using this 2nd HDD to back up the 1st HDD using Ghost each week.

I plan on Formatting this 2nd HDD to NTFS. Now this seems like it's going to be a hassle backing up the 1st HDD, being it's split into 2 partitions and is FAT32. In fact I don't even know if I can do that (back up the 1st HDD from FAT32 to the 2nd HDD NTFS and then restore the 1st HDD if it was needed). It also seems like changing the first HDD to NTFS would not be too efficient being each partition is only 9.5 gigs or so (unless I can go back to 1 partition for the 1st HDD).

What do you guys recommend I do in my situation?

Yes you can undo it. I use Partition Magic to merge the partitions into one. The program will place everything on the second partition into a directory on the first partition or you can move the data off the second partition before merging them.

You don't NEED to merge them back though, unless you want to. There's some very good reasons you should NOT use one large partition. See my explanation here near the end of this post: http://www.pcabusers.net/forums/showthr ... adid=28781

If I decide not to merge back in to one partition, am I going to have problems backing up the 2 partitions being that they are FAT32 and the 2nd HDD will be NTFS, especially if I had to restore back? I don't even know if I cold restore data on NTFS back to a FAT32 partition.

Is it actually beneficial to format both 9.5 gig partitions into NTFS? Would it slow down too much? I was under the impression that NTFS was just for much larger drives.

Makes no difference what they are. You can backup both partitions or each one indvidually. If you want both I recommend making an image of the disk, not the partitions. Easier to restore and you can still extract individual partitions from a disk image.

There's no real benefit in switching to NTFS unless you deal with large files. FAT32 has a file size limit of 4Gb. That can be a problem if you work with large video files or images.