noob help please

Hello, I have a new windows 7 pc. I want to use the built in function of creating a system image. I have an external hard drive ATMT mobile media HDD. ( which you can plug into a T.V, and has a remote control )
The hard drive is fat 32, and has a few images ( made with acronis ) of my old XP laptop, as well as photos/vids etc.
When i tried to create an image, windows 7 told me, the hard drive needed to be nfts.

So I have 2 questions.
1 Can i partition the external hard drive, and have half fat32 and half nfts ? ( and store my new image on the nfts part )
2 If i removed all the files, then changed the whole drive to nfts, then put my files back, would the old XP images still work ( could i still restore my xp laptop if necessary ) ?

Many thanks for any advice/ replies I really appreciate it

 

I think you are better off, splitting that hd into 2 partitions (one being ntfs). Your tv might not be able to read the drive if all ntfs (not sure about it though)

 

Well I wasn't even sure you could do that.Now that you say, you can, then, thats what i was hoping , and i will. Many , many thanks . Much appreciated

 

if you need, how to do it using Win7
http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows-vista/resize-a-partition-for-free-in-windows-vista/

 

As already written by someone else then you might get problems with your TV reading the drive if NTFS present.
With respect to the FAT32 then it is possible that newer Windows will not allow you to format a FAT32 partition larger than 32 GB , so you might have to use a third party partitioning tool like Symantec "Partition Magic".
With repect to if the "old XP images will still work" then that would depend on the backup program used. You would think it would work unconditionally but sometimes backup programs are a little strange, yours will probably work, but I once lost a backup not through corruption but because it became "unrecognizeable" just by being moved. Knows it sounds strange but stranger things have happened

 

Very useful thanks,

It's great that windows has free partition software built in, I remember up to the XP era we had to buy third party partitioning programs to do the job.

@mick92z make sure you have enough spac.. add about 10% to what you think you need in order to make room for capacity loss during partitioning and image file bloat.

 

I think you were right.The option to resize was greyed out. So I plugged the hard drive into my old XP laptop, then downloaded easeus ( which won't work on the 64 bit windows 7 )
Started to resize, unfortunately i could see the laptop was struggling, after about 2 hours, and half way through the operation, it overheated and shut down
Thought i might have lost all my files, however they seem ok.Pheeeeew
You live and learn.
I am backing all the files up now, and will try again next weekend on another old xp laptop ( that one has never shutdown )
Thanks for all your advice, much appreciated. I will get there, but not today.
Many thanks everyone

 

Good that you didn't loose your data.
It seems as you made the mistake of trying to repartition with data on drive , if not then it should not have taken long time for a program to remove the old partition , repartition and quick format (I would originally have advised you to, if possible, move data prior to operation).
I was actually writing you a larger post on the subject previously (yesterday) , then hit a wrong key on the keyboard (or something?) and it was lost so I had to start over and when I came back to the thread then you and "Cudni" seemed to "have things going" so I just made a "minimum post"....