why some manufacturers still sticking with FAT

Hi all
Got this Acer Travelmate 4100WLMI (Pentium M 740, 1.73GHz, 533MHz FSB, 2Mb L2 Cache, 80Gb HDD) its hard drive is already partitioned in two, both are formatted in FAT32.even if I reformat in NTFS and reinstall, their own strange recovery method (3 CDs)will put it back in FAT32. The possible alternative remains is convert, although I am not sure whether covert to NTFS is same as formatting in NTFS (I mean the sector size). I did convert the OS volume C:
The problem is a few moments after defraging C and clicking analyze button it prompts, “you should defragment this volume” Any idea Please: Thank you

 

My observation has been that a lot of these recovery discs boot with some version of DOS (FreeDOS) that can only access FAT partitions. I suspect that this has to do with a licensing issue, and not technical issues.

Personally, I avoid using the recovery discs. The reason being is that the drivers on the discs are outdated at the time you use them; so you have to manually install the updated drivers anyways. It's best to download all the latest drivers prior to re-installing the OS, and manually install everything.

 

I would try the following:

1. Reboot in Safe Mode and run the defrag utility.

Reboot and see if you get the "you should defrag" message.

Info regarding converting from FAT32 to NTFS:

There are a number of issues that you must consider before taking the conversion route. The problems to contend with range from permissions issues to performance degradation.

Permissions: The convert procedure uses the default security settings specified in a file called "Setup Security.inf". If Windows XP was initially installed on a FAT32 partition, the default security settings are not appropriate for NTFS. A workaround is available from microsoft.com.

Performance: On volumes that are created (not converted) as NTFS volumes, clusters start at sector zero, therefore every cluster is aligned on what is known as the cluster boundary. If the FAT32 partition was not created by Windows XP or Windows 2000, the FAT/FAT32 reserved structures mean that a FAT/FAT32 format cannot guarantee that data clusters will be aligned on a cluster boundary. In turn, this can cause the conversion process to be forced to use 512k clusters, thus causing a potentially serious degradation in disk performance.

Tools are available to convert FAT/FAT32 to 4k aligned clusters, but the process is not recommended for the novice thus a clean install with a NTFS format should be considered in preference to a conversion.