To FAT32 or not to FAT32 ?

[amour]

Hey guys http://sysopt.earthweb.com/forum/smile.gif,

I am wonerding what you people think of the Drive Conversion into FAT32 ?. If i were to convert a drive into FAT32 would i have to reinstall any programs, and, is converting into FAT32 really that efficient ?...what are the pros and cons ?

Thanks,
amour.

[Wilan Wong]

I say you should convert to FAT32 u dun need to re-install ur programs again, the pros are: the disk space usage is more efficent (less cluster size), there is a little performance gain, and can handle drive sizes up to 2 terabytes. The only cons is that some OS don't support it (only if u wanna dual-boot), another con is that some DOS apps may not work.

[Steve R Jones]

Which operating system are you currently running? How large is your hard drive? Is the hard drive compressed? How much free space is currently available?

It doesn't happen often, but doing the conversion is as big a change you could possibily ever do. One little power spike or loss there of and or hiccup of the pc and all your data will be toast http://sysopt.earthweb.com/forum/smile.gif

[amour]

Well im running windows 98 on a 2 gig hard disk, partitioned into a C and D drive. I would like to convert the D drive, which at the moment has 275 mb free, so i am wondering how much i can benefit from this conversion.

amour.

[Steve R Jones]

The 275meg will turn into about 300meg or so.

[t048]

I converted a system to fat32 and it destroyed the performance of the system. It still works, just runs like ****. It only had a 1.8 gig hd and I think fat32 is for the larger HDs, so I probably shouldn't have done that. Either way, I will never do that again.

[amour]

i see, well maybe in that case i wont bother converting this little hdd ?.

amour.

[Rat]

I converted my Compaq Deskpro with a 2.5 gig hdd. It went flawless and the performance picked up some, not to mention that I gained over 300MB of room.

BTW, I don't think you can convert only one partition on your drive, you have to do both.

Rat...

[amour]

I heard there can be problems when converting the drive containing the windows folder, resulting in having to reinstall windows, is that true or was someone pulling my leg http://sysopt.earthweb.com/forum/smile.gif.

amour.

[techs]

there is no specific problem with converting the drive that has windows, just the usual(small) possibility that something will go wrong and you will lose all your data.