Partitioning external drive... how ?

[XBoxLPU]

120gb Maxtor 5400 USB2.0 Drive

XP/2000 Disk Management only has a max of 32gb Fat32... I need at least 60gb for one partition and no I do not want to use NTFS ( not that NTFS is bad, just don't want to use it )

Not for sure if Windows 98 boot disk will read an external drive

 

[Mrburns2007]

I recommend FAT 16

 

[johnlog]

Although FAT 16 is a good idea, on a large hard drive the wasted slack space is way to much. With FAT16 you can sometimes use a drive as large as 32 gigs but no more so you will need at least four partitions on a 120 gig drive. Even at that the slack space would be horrendous.

While with FAT32 you can create large partitions with much less lost slack space.

I think your BIOS has to support a 60 gig partition or it will not be fully recognized.

 

[Nothinman]

Why would you not want NTFS?

 

[XBoxLPU]

NTFS tends to be hell to get data off of in case of problems, so I use FAT32 for backup or some common journaled Linux partition because you need to have free access to the data with minimal OS support required.

 

[prosaic]

Originally posted by: XBoxLPU
NTFS tends to be hell to get data off of in case of problems, so I use FAT32 for backup or some common journaled Linux partition because you need to have free access to the data with minimal OS support required.

If you simply use the right tools, instead of relying upon tools from other operating systems, NTFS partitions are no more difficult to recover data from than are other partitions types. Easier than most others, in fact, because the data is still likely to be unscrambled.

And backing up to a hard drive is not really much of a backup. (At least not if that's the only backup solution being used.) You get one good power pop to that system with the USB 2.0 drive connected and your primary data and your "backup" are gone.

- prosaic

Speaking of using "outside tools" for data recovery from NTFS, does anyone know if the Knoppix distribution (the boot-from-CD Linux) is configured to read NTFS partitions? That could make a handy data recovery tool! Hmmm. I'll have to download that sucker and investigate.

 

[Nothinman]

NTFS tends to be hell to get data off of in case of problems, so I use FAT32 for backup or some common journaled Linux partition because you need to have free access to the data with minimal OS support required.

As was mentioned in another thread, either use NTFS4DOS or the Windows Recovery Console.

 

[Need4Speed]

...or one of the many linux floppy distros that has ntfs read built into the kernel. its what i use to recover data from an ntfs drive should something go wrong