When I was USING Win 98 I used an external hardrive for back up and storage. At that time I formatted it for FAT32. Later I switched to Windows XP and formatted all my internal DRIVES with NFTS. Now I would like to partition the ext drive. Can I do that WITHOUT losing all my data? Can I switch the format to NFTS? Or do I have to clean ff the entire drive and start over from scratch? :-?You can't add partitions without losing data unless you use Partition Magic or a similar third party tool.

If you are going to format the external drive, you could format it NTFS. If you do not format it but would still like to convert it to NTFS, I BELIEVE you can do that, same as internal hard drive; see How to Convert FAT Disks to NTFSThanks, I have an old version of Partion Magic on floppy that I have used on both win 98 and XP when I had them both on my PC. I'll check into it Maybe, if I partiition it 50/50 and format the blank half with NFTS, transfer every thing over from the first haf, then i can reformat the first half??? Sounds risky. Anyway, tahnks again. Will let you know how I make out., JIM