The Notebook Review forums were hosted by TechTarget, who shut down them down on January 31, 2022. This static read-only archive was pulled by NBR forum users between January 20 and January 31, 2022, in an effort to make sure that the valuable technical information that had been posted on the forums is preserved. For current discussions, many NBR forum users moved over to NotebookTalk.net after the shutdown.
Problems? See this thread at archive.org.

    Help with w3v hard drive

    Discussion in 'Asus' started by phrozen06, Dec 8, 2005.

  1. phrozen06

    phrozen06 Notebook Enthusiast

    Reputations:
    0
    Messages:
    23
    Likes Received:
    0
    Trophy Points:
    5
    I just got my asus w3v and I think I want to make some changes to the HDD. The way it is set up right now I have 3 partitions. There is a 32.45GB Fat32 C drive a 21.57 GB D NTFS D drive and a 1.86GB Recovery Fat 32 drive. I want to make it one large NTFS Drive or either join the two larger drives into one NTFS drive.

    The reason is that I work with some large files that are not compatible with fat32 and I have an external hard drive that is fat32 that can serve as a recovery drive.

    Do any of you think what I want to do is even necessay or worth the trouble?
    And If I decide I want to do it, can I, how do I, and can I do so without lossing data?

    (Its not a big deal if I can't do it without lossing data because I can back stuff up to my external drive.)
     
    phrozen06, Dec 8, 2005
    #1
  2. pt9386

    pt9386 Notebook Consultant

    Reputations:
    108
    Messages:
    208
    Likes Received:
    0
    Trophy Points:
    30
    The answers to your questions would be,

    1) depends on who you ask, me combining and reformating is a good idea if you don't need all three partitions, e.g. you have an external, and the Fat32 filesystem restricts your files to 4 GB, whereas NTFS does not.

    2) Yes.

    3)You could use something called Partition Magic, to resize, modify, format, change file systems or reformat and repartition using windows, be sure to back up before you do.

    4)Like I said before backup before you do anything to you hard drive, safety first. But using Paritition Magic shouldn't erase anything while it resizes, but no guarantees.
     
    pt9386, Dec 8, 2005
    #2
  3. ZaZ

    ZaZ Super Model Super Moderator

    Reputations:
    4,977
    Messages:
    34,000
    Likes Received:
    1,413
    Trophy Points:
    581
    If you back your data up you won't lose anything. It is completely doable with a Windows disc. Just put it in and delete all the partitions during the setup and make one new NTFS one. I guess whether it is worth it is up to you. Takes me quite a while to do a fresh install of Windows by the time I get everything tweaked just right. That is why I use True Image right after I get it done. Good Luck.
     
    ZaZ, Dec 9, 2005
    #3
  4. LaptopExtreme

    LaptopExtreme Notebook Enthusiast

    Reputations:
    0
    Messages:
    11
    Likes Received:
    0
    Trophy Points:
    5
    With the W3V, you can use the restoration disks that came with your system and restore it back to 1 solid drive. It'll automatically set it to FAT32. There should be a utility on your desktop that can convert your system to NTFS. Just use that.
    Some people would rather format it with an original WinXP CD, but if you dont have that on hand, this should be the easiest for you.
     
    LaptopExtreme, Dec 9, 2005
    #4