Migrating Win XP OS from fat32 to NTFS - True Image or Disk Director or both
Hello,
I have an existing WinXP OS installed on a IDE hard drive which is FAT32 and I wish to migrate this installation to a new SATA hard drive using NTFS.
I assume I need both True Image and Disk Director to perform the above action ..... I cant seem to find anywhere that says True Image will change the format to NTFS on the new drive, but rather just create a copy of the FAT32 filesystem.
If I then need to use Disk Director to change the filesystem on the new SATA drive to NTFS, I have heard that depending on how the FAT32 filesystem was originally created .... you could end up with 512 byte clusters on the new NTFS filesystem, which is not a good idea. (see aumha.org/win5/a/ntfscvt.htm)
Does Disk Director take this into account / manage all of this as part of the conversion process ..... or do I need to follow the manual steps in the above article to realign the partition before conversion, by moving all the data area up to a 4K boundary ... and then defrag etc before using Disk Director ??
I cant remember whether I originally created the FAT32 partition in Win98 or XP ..... I know its old so I dont want to take the chance.
thanks in advance

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Hello Anthony and Seekforever,
Thank you for choosing Acronis Disk Backup Software.
Yes, Seekforever is right - the simplest way is to recover your system in FAT 32 to new drive and convert it to NTFS. Please check this article for the details about convert procedure.
Thank you.
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I wish I had read this thread before I converted my file system. I have a new external 1TB drive that was FAT32 when I bought it. Per advice from this forum, I converted it to NTFS using the windows convert.exe. I how have 512 bye sectors. This thread says that the 4K sector size is better. Can I convert it again to the new sector size, and how to do that.
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Convert won't do it. Most disk partitioning programs will and you may be able to find a simple free one that does.
Personally, I wouldn't worry about it, your speed is throttled by the theoretical maximum 480Mbits/s USB2 throughput not the cluster size.
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