Hi,

Ive got a 500GB HDD that I bought recently and Vista says that i cant have a file larger than 4GB on this disk. I guess this is a Vista thing seeing as my other (internal) disks are NTFS. I'm thinking of changing my FAT32 External HDD to NTFS. I've got a few questions before i do so though:


1. Will i keep all the data on the hard disk if i change it to HDD?
2 . Will my old xp computer be able to access the hard drive?

(Its a windows XP SP2 computer thats about 2/3 years old and it read the hard disk fine beforehand)

Thanks.

if you change to NTFS, XP will still be able to read the files.

is the hard drive split into more than 1 partition?

how much data do you have on the drive?

Its a single partition, just used for storing stuff as apposed to DVDs, which always seem to keep breaking.

Ita got about 265GB worth of files on it, most of taht being media and documents. Is this a bad thing?

It is fine to convert to NTFS, but Windows 98 and older can't read them. If you convert, you can compress the files to save space so in the future you won't have the need of getting a bigger hard drive for more files, and I seem to recall a website that compares file systems. I heard that large volumes (like your 500GB) perform better on NTFS.

For more information, click here.
Or you can go right to NTFS.com for general info.

Thanks for help, ill convert it now.