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Thread: WD Passport drive: shall I format it to NTFS?

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    HEXUS.timelord. Zak33's Avatar
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    WD Passport drive: shall I format it to NTFS?

    Lo people,

    I got a WD Passport drive for my inlaws and they've been very good using their new Vista PC< running weekly backups, which I'm pleased they have taken onboard so well (using Vista's back up software)

    But it's stopped working, throwing an error message about file corruption.

    Is it because it's defaulted to Fat 32 and their backup's have exceeded a certain size? I#m running a disk scan on it at the mo on my PC as it popped into the usb plug and came up with the option... but shall I just format it?

    So far they've not used the built in WD software.. asd I don't know how to use it to show them

    Advice pls guys... format to NTFS? or leave as FAT32? It'll be used on Vista and XP machines tbh, so FAT 32 might be a tad archaic I guess?

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    Does he need a reason? Funkstar's Avatar
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    Re: WD Passport drive: shall I format it to NTFS?

    Personally I would say yes, format as NTFS and let it do a complete long format.

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    Re: WD Passport drive: shall I format it to NTFS?

    I agree, there is an approx 4GB file size limit on FAT32 which could be a problem and NTFS is better for larger drives. Make sure they use safely remove before ejecting it. IMO (if this isn't what you mean by disk scan) run chkdsk /f on it to see if it can repair the file system to allow you to get your files back.

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    Re: WD Passport drive: shall I format it to NTFS?

    If your data is intact you can just convert the disk using convert %diskletter% /fs:ntfs though the advice about a chkdsk is always worth bearing in mind.

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    Re: WD Passport drive: shall I format it to NTFS?

    data is safe.. I have it now

    will format properly to NTFS...just wish it would hurry up moving the files.. it's ARMA night tonight

    Quote Originally Posted by Advice Trinity by Knoxville
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    Re: WD Passport drive: shall I format it to NTFS?

    Had that same problem myself. I formatted the drive fully. Loaded everything back on and so far all seems ok.

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    Re: WD Passport drive: shall I format it to NTFS?

    I'm really surprised that external drives are still being formated to Fat32 as default these days, it was the same with my new Seagate 500 Gig external, it removed all the utils Seagate put on there but to be honest wasn't all that bothered.

    Did a full NTFS format, took all sodding night !!

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    Re: WD Passport drive: shall I format it to NTFS?

    unless you need to share with a mac, which i doubt it then there is no need to keep it in fat32

    even if you need to share with a mac, then you wont be able to write to ntfs but you can still read from it. then again there was ways around that as welll

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    Re: WD Passport drive: shall I format it to NTFS?

    Quote Originally Posted by mightymouse View Post
    unless you need to share with a mac, which i doubt it then there is no need to keep it in fat32

    even if you need to share with a mac, then you wont be able to write to ntfs but you can still read from it. then again there was ways around that as welll
    NTFS-3G adds full support to Macs.

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