"Mixing" FAT and NTSF--Please Help a Moron Understand

  • Thread starter Thread starter mutefan
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mutefan

Okay, I bought a WD 80GB on sale at Office Max for $100. Now the
extent of my stupidity will become clear.

How does adding another drive, with a different file partition system,
"mix" with the original (internal) C: drive? In other words, what does
the sweet little C: drive care if a big sugar daddy E: drive moves in
to the computer, if the big sugar daddy doesn't "give" her anything?
Wow, I should write romance novels.

I bought this WD to edit movies and burn DVDs (I only had 20 gigs on my
ThinkPad); the movie editing program suggested at least 40.
I just don't understand how those extra 80 GBs will "help" the internal
drive do all that work if they have "nothing in common." What is the
"bridge" between the two drives and the two file systems?

I feel like a beauty-school drop-out instead of a computer school
drop-out!
 
Okay, I bought a WD 80GB on sale at Office Max for $100. Now the
extent of my stupidity will become clear.
Click to expand...
I bought this WD to edit movies and burn DVDs (I only had 20 gigs on my
ThinkPad); the movie editing program suggested at least 40.
I just don't understand how those extra 80 GBs will "help" the internal
drive do all that work if they have "nothing in common." What is the
"bridge" between the two drives and the two file systems?
Click to expand...

Simply have your video editing software store the files on the e:
drive (or whatever drive letter is assigned to the external drive.
Create a directory on the e: drive and set that as the default for the
video editing program to use.

BTW, the external Western Digital 80 GB drives that I've seen come
with the drive formatted as FAT32. If you're using Windows NT/2000/XP,
I'd recommend re-formatting the drive using the NTFS file system for
use with large video files.
- -
Gary L.
Reply to the newsgroup only
 
[This followup was posted to comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage and a copy
was sent to the cited author.]

How do you do dat?
Click to expand...

Go to Start/Run, and type CMD. At the command prompt type:
CONVERT x: /FS:NTFS /V (where x: is the drive letter to convert)

The above is the easiest and will retain any data on the drive. The
drawback is that it occasionally creates partitions with 0.5K clusters
instead of the normal 4K clusters. That can cause high fragmentation
problems.

If you don't care what is on the drive, you can do a full reformat:
FORMAT x: /FS:NTFS /X

It's highly recommenced to use NTFS for video editing. ALL versions of
FAT are limited to a 4G individual file size, no matter how big the
partition itself is. NTFS is effectively unlimited right now.
 
Andrew Rossmann wrote:
Something very helpful and kind.

Thank you very much for responding.
 
I got some excellent advice from the last person who responded, but
when it came to labelling the volume, I pooped out.

I know as a computer school drop-out, I should really understand how a
volume is different from a drive, and how a volume can be on two
drives, etc., but I don't.

What does it mean to label a volume, and why do you have to do it?
*Really?*

(Please look at title of thread before responding.)
 
I got some excellent advice from the last person who responded, but
when it came to labelling the volume, I pooped out.

I know as a computer school drop-out, I should really understand how a
volume is different from a drive, and how a volume can be on two
drives, etc., but I don't.

What does it mean to label a volume, and why do you have to do it?
*Really?*
Click to expand...

The volume label is just the 'name' of the drive. When you look at it
in explorer, it's shown instead of a generic 'fixed drive' name or
similar. You can also change it in explorer by simply right clicking the
drive letter and choosing rename.

Instead of using the Format command from the command prompt, you can
also right-click the drive in explorer and choose Format... If you want
to keep existing data, then you have to use CONVERT from the command
line.
 
Andrew said:
The volume label is just the 'name' of the drive. When you look at it
in explorer, it's shown instead of a generic 'fixed drive' name or
similar. You can also change it in explorer by simply right clicking the
drive letter and choosing rename.
Click to expand...

Thanks again, Andrew. When I couldn't name the volume successfully in
DOS, I found a new program on XP's Help; I think it was called Drive
Management. Anyway, I was able to format the new drive through this XP
program.

Happy New Year!
 
Gary L. said:
Simply have your video editing software store the files on the e:
drive (or whatever drive letter is assigned to the external drive.
Create a directory on the e: drive and set that as the default for the
video editing program to use.

BTW, the external Western Digital 80 GB drives that I've seen come
with the drive formatted as FAT32. If you're using Windows NT/2000/XP,
I'd recommend re-formatting the drive using the NTFS file system for
use with large video files.
Click to expand...

footnote
They come formatted as FAT32 so they can be recognized by other systems.
 
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