NTFS and FAT32, competible?

[ELation]

I just put a new harddrive and formated as NTFS but the old drive's filesystem is FAT32.
Is that ok to use like that?

I'm planing to make the new one as a primary and older one as a slave.
How exactly can I do this? I want to leave all the jpg, wmv,mpg and mp3 files in the slave and rest in primary.
Should I copy everything to the new drive(how?) and copy the jpg... back to the old one?


The operation system is XP.

Thanks in advance.

 

[Lord Evermore]

They work just fine together. The file system on one drive doesn't effect the other drive at all, as long as your OS can read them both (which XP can).

If you don't want to do a complete reinstall of XP, you'll need to use software to copy the old drive's partitions to the new drive. Most retail drives come with software to do this, or you can download it from the drive maker's site. Other apps like Partition Magic or Ghost can do the same thing.

Once you have it copied, all the files will still be on the old drive, so you can boot with the drives where you want them, it should use the new drive as the boot drive, and you can just delete anything on the old drive that doesn't need to be there anymore (applications, the Windows directory, et cetera), rather than having to copy files from the new drive back to the old one.

 

[ELation]

Ok cool, thanks for the info.
I downloaded HDcopy program and did move all the file to the new one.

But when I put the primary cable hook up to the new one and slave on the old one, it doesn't boot. What setting do I have to change?

When I just hook up the new one as a Primary, nothing happens. Just Black screen with Dell logo.

Thanks,

hey I've never done this before, alright?

 

you might have to go into your bios and change the boot order to reflect the changes. Also, you also might have to repair the MBR (Master boot record) with XP repair options during bootup. I cant walk ya through it though, as I only have 2000 and dont know the exact order.

 

[Lord Evermore]

I assume you've set the jumpers properly on both drives to indicate the master and slave? You may also try setting them to "cable select" and make sure the master drive is the last drive on the cable.

I only found one valid site for "HDCopy", and it only indicated support up to WindowsNT. WinXP uses a different version of NTFS, so it may not have properly copied the files. I'd suggest downloading the utility from the drive manufacturer to do the copy (just make sure you don't install any of the drive overlays that some of the programs provide, which is used to overcome barriers on older systems to see large drives).