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General discussion

New hard drive and file system

Mar 17, 2004 11:19PM PST

I need to upgrade my hard drive and change my file system. I have a P4 1.6 GB. Computer with 512 ram 40 GB hard drive at 7200 r.p.m. running on XP Home and FAT32. My hard drive is almost full and need to get a larger unit to accommodate my needs. The hard drive is currently partitioned into 2 equal halves being C drive and D drive. This is what I propose to do and need your advice.
Install a new 40 GB hard drive in the old primary position and with the NTFS . Use the old hard drive as a slave. Once the new operating system is up and running, transfer the files I need from the old to the new then format the old drive from FAT 32 to NTFS as well. This is why. I also have 2 other older computers running on WIN 98 SE that I have networked through a wireless router (everything works just fine ) but would like to keep some file folders private which you can?t with FAT 32.
1. Can this be done?
2. Will the transferred files in FAT 32 into the new NTFS drive be affected? They are just .doc and .xls files etc.
3. Will I still be able to run the network on the 3 computers with different operating and file systems?
4. The new HD will become C: What will happen to the assigned drive letters of the old hard drive?

Thanks for your advise in advance.

Discussion is locked

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Re:New hard drive and file system
Mar 18, 2004 5:52AM PST

You should be able to do this with no problem. You can run a network with xp and 98 operating systems, you just need to configure the windows 98 with a program on the xp cd i believe. It is all in the help file for the networking wizard in xp. Your spreadsheets and documents should be fine as well. When you install the new drive as the master, the slave will most likely become drives d and e. Your cd rom will probably become f if there would be an interference with its drive letter now. Just make sure you back up your data carefully before formatting to ntfs. I believe that there is also a tool in xp called convert.exe that you can run without having to erase all data, but I am not really familiar with it, so I would read up on it If I were you. you could also use a program such as partition magic, which will do the job.

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Re:New hard drive and file system
Mar 18, 2004 6:28AM PST

1. Can this be done?
Yes.
You can also investigate using XP's Files & Settings Transfer Wizard to do the job.
Review this link:
http://www.google.ca/search?q=files+%26+settings+transfer+xp&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en&meta=

2. Will the transferred files in FAT 32 into the new NTFS drive be affected? They are just .doc and .xls files etc.
No. The files will work fine after the transfer from a FAT32 dreiv to an NTFS drive.

3. Will I still be able to run the network on the 3 computers with different operating and file systems?
Yes. Over the Network there is not barrier between a FAT32 computer and a NTFS computer. You can freely view the drives and share files once you've got your network set up.

4. The new HD will become C: What will happen to the assigned drive letters of the old hard drive?
I think if you leave your old HDD attached with the new HDD, even though you've jumpered the new HDD as the Primary Master the old HDD partitions will retain the C & D drive letters and your new HDD will be assigned a drive letter after your CD-ROM & CD-RW drive.
If you want your new HDD to be the C Drive then you might want to unplug the old HDD and just set up XP on the new HDD.
Once it is properly set up as the C Drive you can then attach the old HDD and transfer your files.

Following that you can use Disk Management to delete the partitions of the old HDD and create new ones as you see fit and then format to NTFS.

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Re:New hard drive and file system
Mar 19, 2004 7:57AM PST

But a bigger hard drive. The cost difference btween a 40Gig and 80 gig is maybe 20.00.

The OS runs the file system on it's own computer.
Win98 does not read NTFS but it doesn't have to over the network. When you browse the XP box with NTFS over the network, XP reads the files and sends the file info to the Win98 machine.

Note: By default you cannot share the
C:\Program Files or c:\windows
or c:\Doucuments and settings\"User" folders,
where "user" is your login name.

You can however share some subfolders of these.