Hi,

I don't have the whole answer to the question you are asking, but just
remember for those USB boxes to work and recognize the drive, the drive
needs to be partitioned before placing them in the box.

If it's simply a format in the NFSF is should work.  If you delete the
FAT32 partition first you may have some problems.

Thanks and have a Great Day!

Joe Lore
==========================

I asked this question a couple of weeks back and didn't get any relevant
answers.  Before I leap in and just do it, I'll pose it again, in case
anyone has fresh info.

I'm using XP Pro and the host drive has been formatted with NTFS.

I have a satellite drive mounted in a USB 2.0 enclosure which I use for
storage.  This drive is formatted in FAT32.

My question is:
What is likely to occur if I attempt to re-format the FAT32 drive to
NTFS while it's still in the USB box?  I should say that I don't forsee
any need for future compatibility with other FAT32 systems, so that's
not a factor.

I guess I could always take it out of the enclosure and format it that
way, but it's being seen OK by the XP disk management facility where it
is, so I don't know that I'd be gaining anything.

And I appreciate that there's a possible risk of data corruption but I
don't know how likely that is.

The reason I'm considering the re-format is that the drive behaves a
little bit oddly at times.  One example is the way that the system scans
the disk when I turn it on AFTER the main system has booted.  And by
'scan' I don't mean scan as in Scandisk, I mean scan as in 'quickly run
through the disk's contents'.

And the way that I can tell the system to 'share' the drive, but this
setting is always forgotten after a reboot.

So I wondered if perhaps the system isn't 100% comfortable with a
satellite FAT32 drive.

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