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.

TX

Ian Porter
Computer Guys Inc.
Arrowtown
New Zealand
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