Hey, I am at a friends house and I have noticed that he has a new Dell. He is trying to transfer the files from his old hard drive to his new hard drive but has one problem. He has already tried the files and settings transfer wizard. This did not work. His new hard drive is running on a NTFS file system while his old one is running on a FAT32 system. Is there a program that can change file systems or is my friend screwed? Thanx!

Partition Magic...:) JIM

Simple thing to do is remove the HDD from the old system, install it in the new dell as a master on the secondary IDE port. Just remove the ribbon cable from the CD-ROM's. Then boot into windows and copy and paste what he needs. Undo the process and all is back to normal. KTTD

KTTD wouldn't that create a problem having 2 bootable XPs in the same box??? JIM

Kevin's got the right idea. Maybe a easier way is to just remove the old FAT32 drive, jumper it to Slave, and install it on the same IDE cable as your master. NTFS can read FAT32 with no problem. When you boot up, the BIOS will assign the slave a drive letter. Now open Explore, click on the slave, and drag&drop your data files off it onto the Master. You're done.

Fine for data, but if settings such as email messages/accts/desktop/display settings etc need to be transferred (yes I know it can be done easy enuf manually :)), then the easiest method might be to copy these to a cdr. The Transfer Wizard supports transfers via a network, a shared network drive, removable media, or a serial cable connection. The method would be to run the wizard from the old HD, write settings to cdr, then restore to the new drive. Not that I've ever used it tho !!

Jim, It can't and won't create a problem. As long as the drive is on the secondary IDE port there will be no issues at all. It will boot off of the primary drive. Trust me, I do this all the time for clients who have purchased new Dell's. KTTD