Radenkovich’s P(a)lace

Several months have passed since I’ve become a proud owner od Western Digital My Book 750Gb External HDD which came in blue carton box (this version shipped with eSata, 2xFirewire and 1xUSB ports). Initially it was or I choosed to format with FAT32 file system since there were no requirements for some security issues and that was reason to discard NTFS option. After two months I’ve realised what mistaqes it was. Due to 2Gb file size limit I was unavaiable to store my several vmware virtual machines on this drive, they required more additional work (to split virtual hdd into files of 2gb) and after this there were no problem with my virtual machines.

However, situation with DVD images (ISO, NRG and other formats) never cames to solution (other than split image using winrar into segments less that 2Gb and integrate them on target machine - this clearly is not within top 10 solution). Due to lack of judgement in small moment of time I choosed to use Microsoft Windows XP Command Prompt Tool CONVERT.EXE.

Here is command prompt capture:

c:\>convert g: /fs:ntfs

The type of the file system is FAT32.

Enter current volume label for drive G: my book

Volume My Book created 3/21/2003 11:59 AM

Volume Serial Number is 071A-3DEC

Windows is verifying files and folders…

File and folder verification is complete.

Windows has checked the file system and found no problems.

  732.393.152 KB total disk space.

     372.736 KB in 789 hidden files.

      77.248 KB in 2.410 folders.

 528.984.032 KB in 22.849 files.

  202.959.104 KB are available.

       32.768 bytes in each allocation unit.

   22.887.286 total allocation units on disk.

6.342.472 allocation units available on disk.

Determining disk space required for file system conversion…

Total disk space:              732572001 KB

Free space on volume:          202959104 KB

Space required for conversion:  1009711 KB

Converting file system

Conversion complete

…and that’s it! Phew this was close… I didn’t know what time consumption to expect, and there were no information of what percentage is completed during this process. For my 750Gb it took 5-10 minutes to complete process successfully. My Book was attached to IBM T43 notebook with Windows XP and 1Gb RAM memory.