Converting an external hard drive to NTFS

[Theodore Donald Kiravatsos]

I got a Western Digital external hard drive with the FAT32 file format. I am trying to change it to NTFS.

I used the command prompt
<font color="blue">convert e: /fs:ntfs </font>
to attempt this, but then I am prompted

<font color="red"> Enter current volume label for drive E: </font>

What the heck does that mean? How should I answer this? Thanks in advance for any suggestions.

[Freakin]

The volume label is something like "Joes HD" or whatever you ahve the harddrive called... it's a check to make sure that you're converting the correct drive.

[Theodore Donald Kiravatsos]

Judging by how obvious the response is, I appreciate the time you took to answer a retardo question like this.

This is just what I needed! This was a great help, thanks!

[img]/images/graemlins/laugh.gif[/img] [img]/images/graemlins/laugh.gif[/img] [img]/images/graemlins/laugh.gif[/img]

[CORed]

If the hard drive is empty, you don't need to use "convert". It will probably be quicker to reformat. You can either use "format e: /fs:ntfs" from the command line, or format the drive from disk manager. If you already have files stored on the drive and want to preserve them, convert is the correct command. The volume label, if the drive has one (they are not required) can be viewed by right clicking on the drive icon in an explorer window and clicking properties. The volume label is at the top of the "General" tab. You can also see the volume label by doing a DIR from a command prompt type E: &lt;enter&gt; then typ DIR. The first line of output, before th file listing will say Volume in drive D is &lt;volume label&gt;, or Volume in drive D has no label.