Hi, I'm new to the boards and have a problem I was kinda hoping someone could help me with. I am not the most computer literate person so I apologise in advance if I dont make a great deal of sense.

Basically I bought a 80gb pc and have been installing everything to my c: drive. I bought a new printer/scanner the other day and was trying to install the programs to go with it, half way through I had an error message saying that I had insufficient space on my hard drive. I was mortified as I hardly put anything on my computer, I went to my computer and noticed that I have got what i believe is 3 hard drives; a c: drive, a g: drive and a h: drive, as well as my floppy and CD-rom drives. My c: drive only has 2gb of space whereas the other 2 share 70+ gb.

I called up a friend to ask what I should do and he told me that these were 'partitions', and ideally I need to get all of the memory into my c: drive. I went to 'manage' in my computer and went through this troubleshooting thing that lead me to command prompt, i had to type in this code (cant remember what it was), then 'select volume', then 'expand' followed by the amount i want to add to my c: drive (in mb's). I thought id' done it but then when i pressed enter it said that it could not do it as my C: drive is FAT32.

The other drives/partitions (or whatever they are!!) are NTFS.

Called my mate back up and he said that my C: drive ideally wants to be NTFS because its better.

So to clarify my question, can someone tell me how to convert my system from FAT32 to NTFS, and then make it so that i do not have 3 drives showing up, but just the one (c drive.

My operating system is windows XP professional.

I hope that makes sense and that someone can help!! Cheers

Hello Joanne,

I will send you to links on the internet as the answer to this question is very long.


Ok First of all read and try this......
<a href="http://www.banddistribution.co.uk/Su...ning_and.htm">
Click here Now to read how to partition in windows</a>

NEXT if the firts did not work

Ok Important Message before i give you the link to microsoft for your problem....

Important... If you follow these Next steps on a hard disk that is not empty, all the data on that hard disk is permanently deleted.
I recommend that you back up your hard disk before you follow these steps.


<a href="http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=313348">Microsoft page for hard
drive partitioning </a>

<a href="http://www.pcworld.com/howto/article...g,2,00.asp">Pc
worlds Advice page</a>

Hope this helps you out Loz

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Converting a partition from FAT32 to NTFS can be done by an inbuilt utility in the Windows XP operating system � but it is important to realise that it is a one-way process. You cannot convert back, except possibly by use of Partition Magic 7.01, and that is not always successful. Windows XP has no tool for converting from NTFS to FAT32.

There are a couple of things to do in advance if the conversion is to be efficient. If you do not take these preliminary steps, you are liable to end up with only 512 byte clusters, which is not a good idea.

What happens is that FAT32 partitions formatted by most Windows versions except Windows XP itself (and possibly Windows 2000) have an odd multiple of 2 kilobytes in the “system� sectors before the data area, where the File Allocation Tables themselves and clustering start. Therefore, clusters 4 KB in size are not aligned on 4 KB boundaries, as NTFS will want. CONVERT.EXE, finding it cannot use 4K clusters, gives up and makes the clusters only 512 bytes (one half KB) instead. (For a table of the varying default cluster sizes used by FAT16, FAT32, and NTFS for partitions of varying sizes, click here.)

It is, therefore, important to realign the partition before conversion, by moving all the data area up to a 4K boundary. (This will absorb odd sectors at the far end which otherwise would not get used). For this, I suggest BootIT NG, from BootitNG.com. This is a shareware program, priced at US$30 but with a 30-day fully functional trial. You may well find it valuable also for its Disk Imaging and Partition Management capabilities.

Download the BOOTITNG.ZIP file to its own folder, extract the contents of the ZIP file, then run BOOTITNG.EXE, which will make a bootable floppy. Boot this floppy. For purposes of Partition Management, there is no need to install the program to hard disk, so click Cancel Install, thus entering Maintenance. Click Partition Work. Highlight the partition you intend to convert. Click Slide, which has an option check box to Align for NTFS only. Click OK. As it has to move almost every sector on the entire partition, this will take a very long time � schedule it for a meal break, or start it to run overnight. (If it finishes quickly, that probably means that the partition was properly aligned already.)

Then restart the computer, boot Windows XP, being sure to logon as an Administrator, and defragment the disk. This ensures that there is, as far as possible, a contiguous area for the NTFS Master File Table. It is best if there is a fairly substantial amount of free space while you do it.

Now use the Windows XP convert tool: Go to Start | All Programs | Accessories | Command Prompt (or, from a Run box, type CMD) and, assuming you intend to convert C:, give the command:

VOL C:

Note the name of the disk in the first line, and the Volume Serial Number (for example, 3F4E-2D1B) in the second. Then type:

CONVERT C: /FS:NTFS

(http://aumha.org/win5/a/ntfscvt.htm)