Re: reformatting external USB drive

Jo-Anne Naples wrote:
I recently bought two external USB drives for backing up the internal hard drive on my Windows XP SP3 computer. I also bought Acronis True Image 11 Home to do the backups. I thought that when the program did its first backup, it would reformat the external drive from FAT32 to NTFS. However, it didn't. I asked on the Acronis forum and was told the program doesn't reformat drives but that it might be a good idea to do so myself; I was also told that this reformat won't affect data on the drive.

Should I do the reformat? If so, how do I do it? (If you could point me to a website offering this information, that would be wonderful.)

Thank you!

Jo-Anne


I don't think it matters to Acronis what format the backup drive is. If you should want to reformat, it will destroy any data on the drive, unless it is in a separate partition, then you can format the other partition. The time to test it is now. Move a file from it's usual location then see if Acronis can replace it from the USB drive.

Should you desire to reformat a USB drive, plug it in then go to Control Panel>Administrative Tools>Disk Management. Then right click on the USB drive and select Format. MAKE SURE YOU ARE FORMATTING THE CORRECT DRIVE. It will give you a drop-down choice to format in NTFS or Fat32.

I just formatted a USB drive tonight using this, as well as changing it from 3 partitions to a single partition. Very easy.

--
Gerald Ross
Cochran, GA

Too much of a good thing is *wonderful*.




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