XP HD reformat in NTFS or FAT?

[Dale]

For HD reformat - should I select - FAT or NTFS? XP -
drive is 32Gig.

[Joseph Conway [MSFT]]

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.

--
Joseph W. Conway, MCSE
Windows 9x/NT/2000/XP/2003 Server Group

This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.

"Dale" > wrote in message
...
> For HD reformat - should I select - FAT or NTFS? XP -
> drive is 32Gig.

[Bob Harris]

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" > wrote in message
...
> For HD reformat - should I select - FAT or NTFS? XP -
> drive is 32Gig.

[Alex Nichol]

Dale wrote:

>For HD reformat - should I select - FAT or NTFS? XP -=20
>drive is 32Gig.

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


--=20
Alex Nichol MS MVP (Windows Technologies)
Bournemouth, U.K. (remove the D8 bit)