Acer aspire 5633 hard disk

Just purchased an Aspire 5633 and was rather surprised to find the HD (120Gb) formatted into 2 partitions and in FAT32. I have made the 2 recovery dvd's the question is if I re-format the HD into 1 NTFS partition will I be able to use the recovery dvd's to get everything back, or do the dvd's only work with FAT32.

Paul

 

as far as i know the recovery disk only applies to the C:\ drive and doesn't do anything to the D:\.
I do know that the eRecovery software doesn't work on NTFS and therefore i doubt that the recovery DVD will work with NTFS.

 

I happen to know from experience (this is my second acer) that even if you change the file format to NTFS the restore DVDs will still work. As hairy told you the recovery DVDs will recover whatever is the c partition only and not touch any other partition on your drive. Basically it will wipe whatever was on partition C irrespective of what file format was in use (ntfs or fat32). Once it recovers windows the factory file format of fat 32 will be back but all you have to do is use any disk utility to change from fat32 to ntfs or you could use windows itself to do this so there is no real reason to reformat if all you want to do is change from fat32 to ntfs.

Also the reason the HD is split into 2 partitions (acer and acerdata) is because the data partition is where you can store your data so that when you recover windows that data would not get wiped out. If you get rid of this data partition and only have one large C partition, you will then have to back up your data somewhere else because the recovery DVDs or disk to disk recovery will wipe the entire C drive and you will lose any data on it.

 

Recovery disks generally do anything if you know how to use them properly. However, I am unsure as to that exact question. Although my first instincts were that they could, I did a bit of reading and now I do not think that they do.

 

Ok, thanks for the quick replies, I don't understand why they used FAT32 in the first place, I always thought NTFS was more reliable, that's reason I thought of converting. Have any of you converted to NTFS?

 

there's no real reason to convert to NTFS in my opinion, the only real advantage is security and it is supposidly harder to fragment because it makes allownaces for file bloat but i've not noticed it.

 

The first thing I do whenever I recover windows is change to ntfs using a disk utility that I have, the only partition on my drive that is still fat32 is the recovery partition and I cannot do anything about that or it will ruin the recovery partition. NTFS is more secure and more reliable than fat32 also it allows for files that are larger than 4Gb but the security is the biggest reason why people change to ntfs. If you want to read up more on ntfs vs fat32 may I suggest a Google search .

 

I think I will have a go at converting it to NTFS before I put too many apps on in case I loose everything. No great loss if I do it at the moment.
Thanks for all the replies.