Installing new hard drive: fat32 & Vista?

[floete]

I've got a western digital portable drive that i want to take out of its case and put in my Vista-running t60. my first question is: the new drive is fat32. do i need to reformat it to ntfs? i would assume so. and if so how do you do it?

after that, i'm going to use acronis to hopefully do the clone, at which time i'll probably have to come running back here with more questions.

thanks!

[jdhurst]

I don't know if Vista will build a FAT system. NT4, Windows 2000 and Windows XP will build FAT systems, but in my opinion, one should never use FAT with an NT-based system.

First, very large drives need to be NTFS.
Second, NTFS is more robust, less prone to error, and can correct errors on its own fairly easily.

In my opinion, there was never any good reason to use a Windows 9x file system in an NT system. With newer, faster and largers drives, NTFS is the only real choice.

If Vista manages to build a FAT system, open a Command prompt and run convert /? for a how-to on how to run the convert command to convert an existing FAT system to NTFS.
... JDH

[mgo]

I've got a western digital portable drive that i want to take out of its case and put in my Vista-running t60. my first question is: the new drive is fat32. do i need to reformat it to ntfs? i would assume so. and if so how do you do it?

after that, i'm going to use acronis to hopefully do the clone, at which time i'll probably have to come running back here with more questions.

thanks!

You can format the drive out of Windows using disk management. Just leave it in the USB external case for this little job. Then you can put the drive in the ThinkPad main slot and use the Acronis boot disk (you probably created that already) and lay down your image from the drive it's on. Or, do the image first on a separate USB drive.

[msb0b]

You can skip directly to cloning the disk. It does not matter which file system the new disk came with, since the cloning process will duplicate the file system of your original disk.

Vista will work with FAT32 without any problem. NT-based Windows will not format disks over 20-30 GB in FAT32. FAT32 does have several limitations like no permissions, 2/4 GB file size limit, no on-the-fly compression, etc.

[floete]

thanks, all, for the help ... and here i am back needing a bit more.

i reformatted the new drive, removed it from the usb case, swapped it with the drive from the lenovo, ran acronis successfully (or so it said), shut down the computer, (forgot to remove the usb drive at this point), and rebooted. upon rebooting, the computer found some new hardware and installed it.

at this point, i noticed the (old) drive in the usb case running a lot, so i shut down the computer, detached the cable, and rebooted. everything looked good for a bit. got the initial Thinkpad splash screen, got the screen where I log into my ID. But then, right after logging in, the screen goes black. And that's all I get. The mouse cursor is still visible and still moves. I can see that the modem is working and the other usual lights are on. But the screen is black.

arggg!

so I shut down again, reattached the usb drive ... and now the screen is back on again.

where have i gone wrong?

one thing i've noticed is that the c: drive is the usb drive now and the d: drive is the newly installed new drive. could that have something to do with it?

thanks for any help you might be able to offer!

another thought: could it have something to do with jumper settings?

[floete]

fixed it myself whew. problem was, i didn't unplug the usb drive before rebooting after the clone. recloned, unplugged, rebooted and now everything's fine ... at least for the time being!

[mgo]

fixed it myself whew. problem was, i didn't unplug the usb drive before rebooting after the clone. recloned, unplugged, rebooted and now everything's fine ... at least for the time being!

Congrats on the successful troubleshooting. Yep, ThinkPads don't cotton to having two bootable drives at the same time!