2
1
I am trying to convert my external hard drive from fat32 to ntfs. If possible, I want to avoid losing the data or having transfer it off and back on and formatting ( I have about 400gb of data).
I am using windows 7.
[The hard drive is a samsung story 1.5tb drive] It arrived in FAT32 but I did not check this and began using it. For the past year I have been using it without any problems. Only recently had I started to deal with large files and suddenly I noticed that it is not ntfs and that fat32 has a 4gb limit.
I have tried:
1) opening cmd as administrator and doing a conversion there e.g: convert E:/ fs/ntfs This failed. It said messages about the drive being in use and asked me if i wanted to kill these connection i entered Y and it would not convert.
2) I ran chkdsk everything was fine. Tried again as above.. failed to convert to ntfs.
3) I searched for third software to do this - i have in the past used 'partition magic' to do this but i noticed that this program is very old so i found 'EASEUS partition master' it was not able to convert it.
4) I restarted in safemode command prompt and ran the convert E:/ fs/ntfs command from there everything seemed to go right up to the last minute and then it failed to convert.
Are there any other methods other then the obious "move the data off the drive format and place it back on" route.
"Failed to convert" tells absolutely nothing to us. There can be 100 different error messages there. Also, make sure you are entering the command correctly. It's
convert E: /fs:ntfs
, notconvert E:/ fs/ntfs
. – user1686 – 2011-06-29T18:13:48.9201For all the trouble you're going through to convert this, you could have simply moved the data somewhere else, reformatted, and copied it back. Not only would it take less time than a partition conversion, but you should have a backup anyway before attempting the conversion in the first place. What you're attempting is inherently risky. – afrazier – 2011-06-29T20:14:10.987
Not an option with 400GB of data. Thanks anyway – b_uk_happy – 2011-07-02T16:03:37.843