Upgrading from 2 small to 1 large HD..question about my backup cd's..

[steveakaflash]

Will my cd backups made with my HP cd writer be able to put all the data from both hard drives onto the one large one, or will it not be able to write the "d" drive info to the new "c" drive? I also have a question about increasing the cluster size for better performance...Does it help speed, and how is it done? Will my backed up data work on a different drive with different size clusters? Thanks a bunch!

Steve

[smokin1]

You should be able to write to your new larger drive with your backup cd's.I see two ways to do it
first just partition your new drive into c and d and fly at it or second if you really want one partition copy c first and then selectively place the files from your d image onto c where you want them. you may have to fix a shortcut or two with option 2 but hey...they all ran off the same registry right?
I don't quite understand your question about going to larger clusters for better performance. Do you mean fat 32 vs fat 16?
If this is the case fat 32 makes for smalller clusters and will save disk space for you

[steveakaflash]

I thought I read people discussing using fat32, but changing the cluster size for better perf...i must have missunderstood the topic

thanks for the info smokin!

Steve

[nachtgeist]

Adjusting cluster size in FAT16 is useful only (as far as I'm aware) in that you save disk space by _reducing_ cluster size.

Example: Your clusters are set to 32k in size. When you write a file that's 4k, in actuality it's taking up 32k on the disk. That's 28k wasted.
When you expand this to the size of a hard drive, for a 2 gig drive you could end up losing 300 MEGS of drive space! This is why you'd want to reduce the cluster size.

FAT32 is supposed to handle cluster sizes better, but I haven't played with it enough to offer advice.

Adam