[squeaky]

my computer is an emachines it came with no windows cd's , just a restore cd that is made with norton ghost that takes it completely back to factory defaults and makes me lose everything and puts a lot of crap on the machine that i don't want , so i bought an external hard drive thinking that i would be able to save a clean install onto that with the stuff i want.
so i was pondering this when i realised that it would probably be impossible to be able to format my computer hard drive and still be able to transfer the clean install to it, from the external drive. I do not have norton ghost or anything like it so i can't make my own recovery cd's.
does anyone know how i can acheive this and if it's even possible. Also the external hard drive is using FAT32 file system, since my pc hard drive is NTFS would it be wise to change the external drive to NTFS as well and if so how would i go about doing that (for free)
Thanks

[Advertisements]

bump

[squeaky]

bump

[warriorscot]

Well easiest way to have a good drive config(as your post is a little hairy this isnt going to be to specific). Is to have one system partition on your main internal harddrive which is only for the OS and installed programs, then you have the rest of the drive partitioned into one data partion and keep everything you have in one big folder.

Then you have your external drive and you put a partion of the same size as the main drives data one and you simply copy the main data folder over onto it every now and again.

NTFS has its advantages of being a more efficeint file system but its not supported on all non windows systems so if you are going to have the drive used with other computers maybe leave it in FAT32 otherwise just format it in NTFS, easiest way to format is is to right click the drive in my computer and select the format option if you want more in the way of option you can do it in diskmanager, weve had alot of topics on this recently so if you look through the forum youll find it all you want to know.

And dont bump threads its rude, you could at least make a plausible post or question up.

[squeaky]

sorry about bumping, i'm pretty new to forums and i've seen it elsewhere and didn't realise it was bad netiquette.
Thanks for the advice. nice to hear from a fellow scot, i'm in usa and have been for a while so it's always good when i bump into someone from my homeland.

Edited by squeaky, 04 January 2006 - 11:10 PM.