Can external HDD have FAT32 & NTFS

[DAIPWYSO]

Hi all.

My partner (Kate) has a 23GB video file on her laptop which we can't tranfer to our 1TB Toshiba external hard drive. I believe because it's formatted as FAT32?

If this is the case can we format part of the external drive as NTFS ( I believe that's what it's called)?

How do I do it? and most importantly will we lose or corrupt any of the existing FAT32 data (music, photos, files etcc..)

Many thanks in anticipation of your help - again!

Regards Dave

[Match]

Your quite right Fat file system only supports file sizes upto 4G, here is a link that explains what you need to do to convert it to NTFS

 

How to convert a FAT16 volume or a FAT32 volume to an NTFS file system in Windows XP

 

here is another that explains how to create a partition

 

How to use Disk Management to configure basic disks in Windows XP

 

as a precaution I would back up any data you have on the drive somewhere, just incase anything goes wrong or you have any problems

 

please feel free to post any questions you may have about these links ;)

[DAIPWYSO]

Thanks Match.

It seems fairly straightforward but I'll mull it over for a while before attempting it.

Just 1 question: I am using XP with SP3 and Kate is using Vista (ugh!!) we both use the same external drive for backup/storage. If I make a 200GB (for example) NTFS partition will they both access the data ok? As I didn't notice Vista mentioned in the links.

Regards Dave (no tech/low tech)

[Jelly Bean]

As Vista is NTFS I would just convert the whole external to NTFS and check girlfriends machine and see if it is NTFS or FAT32.

 

If it is FAT32 just convert to NTFS.

 

While the external is plugged into the Vista machine it can be partitioned into several partitions via Vista disk management.

 

There should be no problem converting everything to NTFS.