Can I convert FAT32 to NTFS without backing up?

Thanx 2 all U guys. I now have the new HDD installed, I believe as slave. I partitioned it as a PRIMARY PARTITION. But it shows as a separate drive (F) in My Computer; is that right? Or should I have partitioned it as an EXTENDED PARTITION in order fo it to be a slave drive?

Also, because the new HDD is 160GB, it is too big to be formatted to a FAT32 file system. So I had no option but to format it to NTFS.
So...... to be compatible, I have to convert the original master HDD, Samsung 36GB, which is C drive, from FAT32 to NTFS. Can I convert C drive from FAT32 to NTFS without backing up everything on the drive?

 

Sounds like you have Windows 2000 or XP.

Allow me to clear some things up.

You can have up to 4 primary partitions. Leave it this way. Extended partitions aren't any better, and they cannot support another OS, in the event you ever wanted to dual boot, and so forth. Master and Slave relationships are irrelevant in this case.

You do not have to convert your C: drive to NTFS. There are no compatibility issues, and so on. While you can convert from Fat32 to NTFS without backing up, its a fool's errand. One little glitch, and your data will be toast. Is it really worth it? Only you can make that call.

 

Thank U Adrynalyne

But if I am using the new 160GB NTFS drive as a slave to the original 36GB FAT32 master drive, which has all the programs on it, will the FAT32 master drive be able to save data on the NTFS slave and retrieve it when needed.

I am thinking particularly of saving data files on and retrieving them from the NTFS slave from game programs stored on the FAT32 master.

I really only want to use the new drive as more storage memory because I only have 2GB free on the original 36GB drive.

 

Filesystems are irrelevant in this case. The only thing that decides whether an OS can use a certain filesystem is a driver. In this case, Windows XP has both, ntfs.sys for NTFS filesystems, and fastfat.sys for Fat32 filesystems.

Windows XP supports read and write functions to both. The biggest obvious difference is the fact that NTFS has security at a filesystem level and fat32 has squat. There are other differences, but thats the most obvious.

In short, no, Windows XP will not care or skip a beat if you have these mixed filesystems on your computer. You probably wont even notice a difference.