Hello,
My problem is I had changed my volume to NTSF. I also had an external hard drive manufactured by ACOM Data. It also changed to NTSF along with everything else. I didnt like NTSF so I reloaded Windows XP and formated back to Fat32. I have files on the external hard drive that I need. How can I get them? When I went to set up the external hard drive again it is wanting me to reformat it again to fat32. If I do this I will lose everything on it. There must be some way to get my files off of it first?

You can use programmes like Partition Magic http://www.powerquest.com or Partition Commander http://www.v-com.com to convert NTFS to FAT32. Otherwise, you'll have to reformat the partition and then reinstall everything from scratch.

if you know someone with a pc that is using
ntfs, and has a cd-rw they could copy it to cd-r's and then you could format it to fat32
,and copy the cd's to it.
or a computer shop would probably do it for some $$

XP should not have any issues with a second disk using NTFS.

However you can copy any files from this to another FAT32 drive or ZIP or LS120 or backup to CD-ROM.

After doing this, if you don't have partition magic, you don't simply reformat the external HDD as FAT32.

You will need to run FDISK and delete the current partitioning.

Then reboot and run FDISK this time set up a DOS partition using the full extent og the HDD.

Then reboot and run FORMAT on this external HDD and it should allow you to choose FAT32.

Hi,

No disrespect intended towards Brian but XP can handle anything you need to do with that external drive. You may have left out some important data as the symptoms you present don't add up. Check in drive management what XP thinks is going on with that external drive. Did it have data on it when you first connected it to this system? And then did you format it as NTFS? Or was there no data, you formatted it as NTFS, and then added data? Either way if it was correctly formatted XP can copy whatever is there to another drive. Just try first to copy the data without trying to "set it up." If there was data on the drive, XP saved it when it converted the drive to NTFS and it should still be there.

Just an observation - NTFS takes a while to make its value apparent. I sense you didn't give it a chance. It really is superior to FAT32 in preserving your data because of journalling, where it keeps track of everything it does in a "journal" and can recall that information to put things right if something goes awry.

Good Luck