Formatting My Book Premium Hard Drive

[Enfer Singe]

I got a my book premium hard drive from western digital and all the software for it comes on the hard drive and not on a disk. I want to format it to ntfs but I don't want to lose this auto play type stuff on the hard drive. If I copy the contents of the external onto another one, format the external, and then put the stuff back on the external, will it still do the auto play and run the installer when I plug it onto another computer? Thanks.

 

[Lord Evermore]

It should do exactly that. The way auto-play works is that Windows looks for the autoplay.ini (or is it inf? I forget) file on whatever removable drive or optical disk you put in, and then runs whatever that file says to run. As long as auto-play is enabled for the drive in Windows, it'll look for that file, if it can't find it it pops up the generic list of options for what you want to do with the drive.

 

[corkyg]

You can CONVERT the format from FAT 32 to NTFS without losing anything on the drive. XP can do that for you. It is done through the Command Prompt.

To convert a volume to NTFS from the command prompt
1. Open the Command Prompt window.
2. In the command prompt window, type convert drive_letter: /fs:ntfs

For example, typing convert D: /fs:ntfs would format drive D: with the ntfs format.

It will not harm any files or data on the drive.

 

[Lord Evermore]

Performance of a converted file system however can be dreadful. Windows has to convert it so that you end up with 512 byte cluster sizes, instead of the default 4KB. There are of course 3rd-party utilities, some of which may be free, which can convert it properly.

 

[JimPhelpsMI]

Hi, The Lord is correct as usual. The file is Autorun.Inf. It contains an entry "Open= 'the executable to run'". Can contain a lot of other useful commands. For example "Icon='The Icon to show in the Directory'". Search for Autorun for more details.

Good Luck, Jim