Bought an external hard drive, what next?

suman_das

My friend has a few years old laptop with 40GB HD. As he needs more space, he bought a 320GB Maxtor external hard drive. He is however not sure about the first steps with that. Should he partition it to keep AV files and data files seperate? If so, how? I have been told that you need to use FAT32 for AV and NTFS for data, is it so?
He also wants a complete backup of his computer in the external drive, how to do that? There is no software provided and he would prefer to use reliable freeware if any.
He is a computer novice, I am not much better. Would appreciate any help, in simple terms please.

Idiophreak

If he needs more space, I wouldn't worry too much about the Fat32/NTFS thing...I'd probably just use the internal disk (which should have better performance with any luck...) for program files (office etc) and then the external for my documents...AV files, word docs etc etc.

Clearly this means he wouldn't be able to backup any of his docs, however...
(backing up the external HDD to the external HDD is...not backing up )

If he wants to back *everything* up, he could look at either burning stuff to DVD or getting another external HDD.

jonnypb

format drive using ntfs, right click on drive in windows explorer and select format. there is a tick box for ntfs

can yous windows backup to backup his laptop to create a bkf file and then put this on the backup drive