Formatting an external drive

LondonDiva

Help!

I've recently bought an external drive for backing up and when I went to copy & paste documents across I came across a 'back up' tool in my system tools which seemed better in case a blue screen of death happens.

Problem is everytime I use it it stops and tells me the max size allowed is 4gb and that it must be FAT formatted.

I have not a clue what any of that means and what I need to do or whether my initial choice of copying and pasting documents is better than creating a back up file via windows.

Any advice welcome

fwor

I'd guess you're using a version of Windows.

If so, plug the external HDD in, wait until it's recognised and then go to Disk Management (in some versions of Windows this can be quite hard to find). You can reformat it to a better filesystem than FAT from there. NTFS is a good choice ~but~ be aware that if you use it on different PCs you may run into permissions issues. They aren't hard to resolve - you just need to be aware of the possibility.

And of course when you reformat, everything already on it will be lost.

John_Gray

To stand a good chance of saving the files already on the external hard disk, go into a Command Prompt window and type

CONVERT x: /FS:NTFS

replacing the 'x' with whatever drive letter the external hard disk currently has. Note that this will take (probably) as least as long as a complete format would take, which depends on the size of the hard disk, and could be an hour or even longer.

LondonDiva

Thanks guys!

So to check, you would advise me to reformat the external drive to NTFS and then create back up files?

John Gray - I have no problem wiping the drive as it only arrived last week, This was to be the first back up.

fwor

Yes. They are only shipped with FAT formatting because it's the lowest common denominator that everything can read from and write to.

As John Gray says, there are ways to convert from one filesystem to another, but in this case I'd recommend just to format from scratch as it's a new drive.