Folks, don't bother to reply to this question - my post of the 10th must
have got lost in cyberspace and I've since solved it myself.  Obviously, it
IS possible to upgrade 'on the fly' to NTFS, as I've done it.

However, I am curious as to whether there's an app to pre-format drives with
the NTFS file system - like an NTFS FDisk.

I know it's possible to do it with a Maxtor utility, but it's
brand-specific.  Does anyone know of such a utility which will handle any
make of drive, like FDisk used to?

Ian Porter
Computer Guys Inc.
Arrowtown
New Zealand
[log in to unmask]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Ian" Subject: [PCBUILD] XP Expertise needed


> On a sudden impulse, I dropped XP Pro on top of my faithful Win98SE
system.
> (I hope it doesn't get the sulks)
>
> I have a couple of queries for XP gurus: I did the 'Upgrade' instead of
the
> 'Fresh Install'.  The newish 20gb drive had been recently formatted FAT32,
> and, as there were no options during the install to change to NTFS, it
> stayed that way.
>
> My first query is: Is it possible to change the file system now to NTFS?
> Second query: Are there any significant advantages to changing the file
> system to NTFS?
>
> There was one unexpected result of the conversion.  I defragged the drive
> shortly after the operation and the report shows that the file system is
> FAT32, with a cluster size of 4K.
>
> This seems odd, as the drive's slave, a newish 40gb drive, is also
formatted
> FAT32, but shows a cluster size of 32K.

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