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    Hard-drive Format

    Discussion in 'Hardware Components and Aftermarket Upgrades' started by hehe299792458, Dec 16, 2006.

  1. hehe299792458

    hehe299792458 Notebook Deity

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    I have an external hard-drive and recently formatted it. However, after the format, I realized that there are still 76mb of stuff on the HD. I formatted again, and they still remained on there. I went into the drive, selected all (even though there was none) and pressed delete. It didn't seem to help. Is this normal?
     
    hehe299792458, Dec 16, 2006
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  2. Gautam

    Gautam election 2008 NBR Reviewer

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    How do you figure that there are things on the HD?
     
    Gautam, Dec 18, 2006
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  3. NetBrakr

    NetBrakr Notebook Deity

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    Well, it is depends. I just format one of my partition on the main drive and my external drive. On the partition drive is NTFS, but on the external drive is FAT32. On NTFS, take about 70 MB, but on the FAT32, just couple of KB. If you have the drive to NTFS, yes, its normal.

    JC
     
    NetBrakr, Dec 18, 2006
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  4. hehe299792458

    hehe299792458 Notebook Deity

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    I right-clicked on the HD and chose prosperities.


    Is it better to format as FAT32 or NTFS is i'm going to the use external drive for backup purposes?
     
    hehe299792458, Dec 19, 2006
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  5. NetBrakr

    NetBrakr Notebook Deity

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    Well, it is depends on what is the size of your HD. If it is over 32 GB, you have only one choice, NTFS. Thats why my second partition is NTFS, its 40 GB. And my external HD is 30 GB.

    Click here for more info.

    http://www.ntfs.com/ntfs_vs_fat.htm

    JC
     
    NetBrakr, Dec 19, 2006
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  6. Jalf

    Jalf Comrade Santa

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    I'd guess it's simply space used by the filesystem. That's hard to avoid.
     
    Jalf, Dec 19, 2006
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  7. Budding

    Budding Notebook Virtuoso

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    You can use FAT32 on drives larger than 32GB, you just cannot use Microsoft Window's Formatting tool to format the drive. Just use a different program to format it.

    If the only OS you know you will use is Windows, then you should go NTFS, but if you use Linux or Mac OS or Sun Solaris etc. then you should go FAT32 because that file system can be read by and written to by all these systems. The only noticable downside of FAT32 is that a single file cannot be larger than 4GB. Other than that it's fine.
     
    Budding, Dec 19, 2006
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