I'm still not sure whether or no to attempt to convert from FAT32 to NTFS, my previous W98 system drive, which is now attached as a satellite to my XP Pro system in an external USB2.0 box.

I'm not even sure that it's possible to carry out such a conversion on a USB drive, if anyone has any information either way, I'd appreciate it. 

The reason I asked about it was more academic than anything else - I was just curious as to whether there were any advantages or disadvantages to converting it.  I've taken of Peter's comment about the superior compressibility of NTFS.

Joe thought it might be useful to keep the drive in it's original FAT32 state. However, I've now deleted the Windows folder and all associated files, so all the bridges are down.  The drive is now just a storage facility.

Which brings me to the main reason I'm posting this - it's in the nature of a FWIW about defragging this USB 2.0 drive.

The native XP defragger (which is a version of Diskeeper) wasn't much interested in defragging the FAT32 drive - it just sat and did nothing.  So I installed Vopt XP 7.13 and ran THAT on the USB drive.  This very efficient defragger did the job without any problems, tho it seemed to take a little longer than I expected - perhaps a consequence of the USB connection.

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


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