XP HD reformat in NTFS or FAT?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Dale
  • Start date Start date
You can choose either, depends on if you plan to dual boot something from
the 9x line of OS's with your Windows XP NTFS drives as the Windows 9x
portion wont be able to see the information that is NTFS. If you only plan
to have XP, I would choose NTFS.
 
I would use NTFS as I am having problems with a new big
second disk which only works under NTFS . The original
works under FAT32 I dont think windows XP can cope with
both so it seems like one or the other. FAT32 is no good
for big disks
 
NTFS is the standard choice with XP, and is somewhat more secure and maybe
more robust. But, FAT32 has more possibilities for disaster recovery, and
is required if you plan to dual boot or network PCs with win98 or ME or
LINUX.

My own experience is that FAT32 works fine with XP on large disk, up to 120
Gig. (XP will refuse o format as FAT32 is lager than 32 Gig, but it will
use the disk if you can manually format by third-party software like
Maxblast, SeaTools, FDISK (modern version), GDISK, etc. However, not all
motherboards can handle disks greater than 32 Gig, others have a limit at
about 127 Gig.
 
Dale said:
For HD reformat - should I select - FAT or NTFS? XP -
drive is 32Gig.
Click to expand...

Considerations - see www.aumha.org/win5/a/ntfs.htm
32 GB is the break point - at that and above XP will only format as NTFS
anyway. Unless there are other considerations (like needing to see it
also from an old system, dual booted, I would use NTFS certainly at 16GB
and above
 
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