Very basic question

I'm putting together a new system tomorrow morning. Nothing fancy but I will be going from Win ME to XP.

What file system should I use for the partition on the internal backup drive that will hold Arconis images - NTFS or FAT32?

I already have an external hard drive partitioned and have been writing images to a FAT32 partition from Win ME. Will I be able to write from XP to this FAT32 partition? Or do I need to reformat it?

Hope to get an answer before all this starts happening.

Many thanks.

earther

 

Of course you will be able to write Acronis images to a Fat 32 drive but with the proviso that you will have to specify a maximum size for the Acronis image of 4 GB (perhaps a little under 4 GB to be on the safe side) as a Fat 32 partition will not accept an individual file bigger than 4 GB. I believe you are better off converting the partition to NTFS if you install Windows XP. The only real reason these days to have fat 32 is in case you want to connect the Fat 32 drive to another computer that uses Win ME or 98 or if you have a dual boot system that has Win ME or 98 as one of the systems and you want the Win ME or 98 system to see the other drive. I have an external USB drive with Fat 32 because occasionally a friend needs some program or data I have and the friend uses Win ME. All my internal drives are NTFS.

 

Thanks, mareke. Sounds like I should format the internal partitions to NTFS. But I will leave the external drive as FAT32 so I can do externals backups from Win ME occasionally too.

Thanks for the heads up about the file size. So far the images have been under 3GB at normal compression. If it were over 4GB and I hadn't specified a max size for the image, wouldn't Acronis have split the file automatically? Or would the image creation have just failed?

 

Hello earther,

Thank you for choosing Acronis True Image (http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/products/trueimage/).

You don't need to specify the image size. If you store it to a FAT32 partition Acronis True Image will recognize it and split images itself. However there may some difficulties appear if you create images onto NTFS partition and then decide to copy them to FAT32.

Also please note that you are able to convert FAT32 partition into NTFS without data loss with Windows XP tool. To do that please press "Start" -> "Run" and issue the command

convert <disk letter>: /fs:ntfs

Please make sure you haven't got any applications that use the partition before inputting the command.

Thank you.
--
Ilya Toytman

 

Thanks Ilya. That's just what I needed to know.