Backups with a My Book drive.

A while back I purchased a 1tb external hard drive. The My Book from Western Digital was a great buy, even at Best Buy who had it on sale for a little over $60. If I had the extra money, I would have bought more! So I had to settle on one. Anyway, I forgot one thing about these external hard drives. They are always Fat32. So if I wanted to do backups I had to use Western Digitals lousy backup software instead of my own Backup Exec software. Reason being is Fat32 only supports files sizes up to 4 gb in size. If I want to have files more than 4gb on My Book, I have to convert the drive to NTFS. Which is a fairly painless operations. The only headaches I have had with Windows drive conversion is when there is an application or two accessing the drive or if there are any bit level errors. So here is how I did it.

There are three steps to this process, steps 2 and 3 are all done from the command line.

1. Verify there are no open files or programs from the drive you want to convert.

2. Run a Check disk (chkdsk /f) to verify/fix if there are any bad sectors or any issues with the drive.

3. Run Convert (convert DRIVELETTER: /fs:NTFS). This converts the drive into the file system of choice. Since I'm a windows junky, NTFS it is.

Now, I can backup to my hearts content, with the software of my choice. :)

- Draok Out