PCA Forums

im expecting my new 80 gig hd soon and was wondering.. i want to tranfer all my stuff from my current drive which is fat32 to my new drive, WHICH will be NTFS..

i figure i would take my current hd out and stick the new one in to partition it and format and set it to NTFS, then put my current hd back in and boot the new 80 gig as slave to transfer stuff over.

i was wondering if this was possible.. will the data on my current harddrive which is FAT32 get messed up if put on my new hd which is NTFS.

thanks peoples

the best way to do this is with Norton Ghost or the utility that comes with the hard drive. In any case, you can only copy to a same file format. Also, when your done transferring your hard drive, you can boot to Xp and just run the convert command and when you reboot it will change the file system to ntfs.

Interesting in that I just copied over an entire HDD (FAT32) to an NFTS HDD. Neither were boot drives so maybe that has something to do with it. Anyone know if this is a factor? All I know is if you're just transferring files from one storage drive ( FAT32) to an NTFS formatted drive, it works fine. Not to mention that the drives are on two different controllers too ! One ( FAT32) was on the o/b VIA IDE channel and the NTFS drive is on the o/b Promise SATA controller. Crazy I know.

I just opened FAT32 drive in explorer selected edit > select all > rt click > copy. Then opened NTFS HDD in it's own window and rt click > paste and it worked like a charm. Took a few minutes for everything to transfer over.

Playing some MP3's right now from the transferred files. Sound fine. :

In any case, you can only copy to a same file format.

Umm... no. Doesn't matter what file format you're using on the source or destination if you're just copying files.

Well I sure feel better.

In fact, now that I think about it, last week I ghosted an image of my RAID set ( NTFS ) boot drives over to a FAT32 partition and then put it back on the NTFS RAID after changing the stripe size in the RAID BIOS. Worked fine.

I think what smb is saying is that if you do a Ghost partition to parittion copy then it will be FAT32 and not NTFS. You can convert your FAT32 to NTFS then Ghost but you can't get a FAT32 boot drive to work for a NTFS without doing a conversion to NTFS first.

thanks guys.. no worries from me to just straight copy stuff over now.. thanks