I would like to convert my old drive from FAT32 to NTFS. If I use Drive Image 7, should I back up my old FAT32 drive, reformat the old FAT32 drive as NTFS, and then restore the back-up? Will this bring me back to FAT32 or keep NTFS? Should I skip all that and just use convert.exe to change from FAT32 to NTFS? Which way will be have better performance and ensure I get the small 4kb cluster? I tried convert.exe and got this report from Nortan System Information on the converted 9.36 Gb drive: Sections per Cluser: 1 Bytes per Sector: 512 Total Clusters: 19,518,911 Free Clusters: 5,543,139 Total Bytes: 9.993,682,432 Free Bytes: 2,838,138,368 All my other drives (FAT32 or NTFS) read have 8 Sectors per Cluster and 512 Bytes per Cluster. The converion set the drive to only 1 sector per cluster and used up about 80 Mb of space. What happened and is this bad? I know using WinXP setup to convert and then using a fresh install is the best way to change, but I don't want to spend 2 weeks reinstalling everything. How do I make sure I am running at the 4kb clusters and also running the drive as efficiently as possible? Thanks for help!

I believe the sectors per clusteris determined by the size of the partition and what you set for cluster size. My 16gig is 512k and 1 sector per cluster. My 50gig is 512k and 8 sectors per 4k cluster. Since convert has no cluster size switch it must just use defaults of 512k. The tool you really need is Partition Magic. This is what it does best in my opinion. The other info you need to understand is 4k cluster sizes does NOT mean "efficiently as possible". You waste less space but you give up performance. If you want a balance between wasted space and performance you need to know your average file size. You would size your clusters to a multiple of this number. For example lets say your average file size is 128k. You could do 2x64k=128k so your cluster size would be 64k. you could even do 4x32k=128k so each cluster would be 32k. This means your average file will fit in 2 or 4 pieces on the disk. If you went with 4k clusters you would have the file in 32 pieces. So which do you think will take longer to pick up? 2-4 pieces or 32 pieces. Those folks doing video editing will want huge cluster sizes. They would never want 4k cluster sizes due to the size of files [1gig plus]. Can you imagine the disk having to write 1gig of data. That would be 1,073,471,824 / 4096 = 262144 That's over 2 1/2 thousand writes for 1 file!!! Make sense?

Yhere was a post a few days ago where a person converted to NTFS and ended up with 512 bit clusters, which seemed to be the default for convert. He was desperatly trying to change to 4k clusters and as far as I know, he ever found a way to do it. Using Drive Image will not work. He restores the drive to what the backup is and would not change it to NTFS.

Thanks for help. This cleared up a lot. Sounds like I will have to invest in Partition Magic to change the cluser size.