d12agonxboi

i just got a new hd and i want to convert it to NFTS, how would i go about doing that? and also the old HD i have is using Fat32 and i want to ghost the old HD and ghost that to the new HD. i wont be using the old HD with the computer anymore. So is this possible? using an old fat32 to a NFTS hd and how would i go about ghosting? and would ghosting keep all my settings such as the registry and the rest. i'm fairly new to ghosting and NFTS thanks for the help

zero2dash

Reformat it. If it's your bootup drive you'll have to use FDISK through DOS, if you can boot off another drive (ie one with Windows on it already) you can add the secondary HD as a Slave drive and Format it from within Windows because it's not the boot drive (Windows doesn't let you format any drives that Windows boots off of course).


If I understand correctly, you're asking if you can Ghost the FAT32 drive, get rid of it, and use Ghost to install that partition image onto the NTFS drive. If that's what you're asking, then no you can't do it (as far as I know). Well, you CAN do it but the 2nd drive, the NTFS one, will (most likely) be made a FAT32 drive because you're using a FAT32 partition on it. I see troubles in your future.


Yes if you Ghost a drive it saves everything physically *on* that drive from within Windows - this includes registry entries, drivers, system settings, network settings, any and all installed programs, and other files on the hard drive ie mp3s, mpeg movies etc.

Note though that Ghost DOES NOT *WRITE* onto an NTFS partition drive. It can READ an NTFS drive and it can Ghost an NTFS partition HOWEVER it will not allow you to have an NTFS drive as the DESTINATION for the image. (I hope you understand what I mean.) So if you want to use a FAT32 partition drive and Ghost it, you can ONLY write the Ghost image TO a FAT32 formatted drive, NOT an NTFS one. This sucks, and I hate it but that's the way Ghost is...it doesn't have support (not even the newest version) for writing TO an NTFS drive. (PowerQuest Drive Image CAN, however.)

I'm in the process of Ghosting my drive as well right now.
Best advice I can give you is just to burn directly to CD if you have a burner; the newest version of Ghost includes support to burn images directly to CD and it saves a lot of hassle and headaches (and eliminates the "you can't write to an NTFS drive" for me which is what all 3 of my 2 PC's hard drives ARE). It will also use the extra 50 megs of space if you use a 700 meg/80 minute CDR it's pretty cool that it self-adjusts to do so. One more good piece of advice is that you should only Ghost a CLEAN drive...ie one with clean installs of whatever you want to have Ghost-ed. I know this is a pain in the ass, but in my case at least I've reinstalled Windows 2000 Professional, I'm updating it as I type this on my secondary PC, and I'm going to install all the programs I use (the graphic design apps mainly). I only install what I'll use a lot and I also try not to install software that is updated frequently (ie like KaZaA). After doing these steps I'm Ghosting the drive. I've done this in the past and it works excellent...I'd definitely recommend clean install Ghosting over a drive that has been used frequently and could contain bad files, bad blocks, problem files, viruses/trojans etc. because if you Ghost that drive and it fails on you because of a bad registry entry, for instance - when you re-image it with the Ghost image, it will eventually have the same registry entry problem and crash AGAIN. With a clean drive you know there's nothing to worry about because the drive is clean, problem free, and nothing but fresh installs.

In a nutshell, my process is this:
1. Reinstall Windows
2. Update all of Windows' components (including IE)
3. Install ALL of the applications/programs I use
4. Open ALL these programs, set the preferences to what I like, register/not register etc. said programs, set all Windows functions to my liking (Start Menu, Control Panels etc)
5. Delete all files in the TEMP directory (with installing programs comes tons of TEMP files)
6. Delete all other *traces* of being used ie cookies, temp internet files etc.
7. Reboot for about the 10th time and run ScanDisk
8. Run Disk Defragmenter
9. Ghost the drive

It's a lot of work (depending upon how many programs you have to install). Usually on a good day I can do all the above steps in about 4 hours if I'm slacking (which is most often). Take into consideration that in addition to installing files, you have updates (in most cases) to install for each program, etc. plus the customizing/setting preferences in each programs takes a lot of time up as well. Figure anywhere between 30 minutes to an hour for installing Windows itself...another 30 minutes or so (on broadband) to update all portions of Windows. Questionable time installing programs...not a whole lot? 20 minutes. 30 apps? (About what I do.) Like 1 hour, maybe 1 1/2.

I highly recommend this site for information on Ghosting drives. The guide this guy put up helped me immensely.

http://ghost.radified.com/norton_ghost_1.htm

Good luck.

d12agonxboi

ooo thankx zero for the greatly detailed reply, i couldn't get a chance to get Norton ghost so i got Drive Image instead, i know its prolly not as great as Norton ghost but it did the trick for me, but the only thing that sucks is i didn't know that Drive Image supported writing to an NFTS drive so now i might have to go back n Image the Drive and convert the main partition to NFTS and put the Image back on that drive. is NFTS worth the trouble do you think? i've never tried to use NFTS before, i've never had ne trouble with Fat32 so i had no reason to convert over to NFTS, well i'll think about converting over someday soon, maybe hehe, thankx again

zero2dash

I don't honestly know if there's much difference in terms of data quality/storage etc. between FAT32 and NTFS. I would *think* that NTFS is better, just based on the common knowledge that NTFS stands for NT File System (or is the S "Structure") and of course NT is the most stable Windows that you could have. (And NT kernel-based OS's like Win2k...I'm not mentioning XP because not only do I hate it, but it's screwed my computer up, has about 3 billion security holes, and it crashed on me A LOT.) I would tend to *believe* that NTFS is a more stable, hassle-free format than FAT32 (which is primarily used on older Windows platforms like 98, 98SE and ME) but I have no experience or data to confirm that. I know that XP will install on either a FAT32 or an NTFS partition, and I believe that Win2k will also. So you could truly go either way and you should be able to install it, but I think there's some other drive options and whatnot that Win2k uses that it will only use on an NTFS drive (like Easy Indexing and Archiving, I think).

I don't have any experience with Drive Image, the site above does mention it quite a few times and I think there's either a guide on it somewhere on that site or a link to a site that does have a guide. For all intents and purposes though I'm sure Drive Image works just as good as Ghost.