Is it possible to format and partition a 160GB drive to only 80GB?

[AnalogOldguy]

Meanwhile, I have gotten emails from Ebay, "You have requested a refund" "The seller is reviewing your request for a refund" " The seller has accepted your request for a refund" "The refund has been returned from your paypal account"

I actually requested an exchange...

Meanwhile, Trainz 2004 is running happily on a Maxtor 40GB IDE drive, and I am rediscovering the joys of simplicity. A few of the built in routes are pretty enjoyable.

I am trying out various locos and rolling stock. Some of the stock passenger cars have transparent windows and opening doors. Some of the stock locos are looking kind of interesting. Gee whiz, the Red Hen car has a very good interior and a nice bold horn.

I am happy in the middle of my tribulations.

 

[AnalogOldguy]

How about this !!!

How about this .... you guys were right, they were out of the 80GB drives so they sent the 160GB one.

But how about this, I got a refund for the trouble, and they told me to keep the drive !! As they wrote to me ....

We are currently out of stock for the WD800AAJS, that's why I issued a full refund on eBay, and you don' t need to return the hard drive, you can keep it as free gift.

Son of a gun, how often does that happen? If it runs properly, I will try to format it, (I think as an 80GB FAT32 first) then, if you guys are right, I can access my 60GB backup drive and transfer my "World" and "Local" folders into my Trainz!

I'll probably give it a try Saturday or Sunday. Right now, I am a HAPPY man !! I'll come back here and tell how it went. Thanks again, I got a lot of ideas from you guys! Bob P.

Being an old guy, I am still slightly afraid of NTFS and how it would get along with my backup drive. I sort of know I could convert it to NTFS , but the thought that I might lose my Trainz backups still scares me at this point.

 

[clam1952]

NTFS has been around a very long time, since 1991 and is a far far superior file system to fat 32 there really is nothing to worry about if you did use it.

Well done on the free drive though!

 

[Zeldaboy14]

From my experience (in both virtual machines and actual towers) fat32 is really only good in this day and age with things like flashdrives and sd cards. NTFS first really came around with Windows NT 4.0 (which I just recently bought a brand new sofware thing of) and since then, NTFS was far superior to FAT32 file system. Heck, one little issue with your drive, and bam, you gotta redo the machine. NTFS? You can do more, and not have to reinstall as often.

 

[BuilderBob]

Being an old guy, I am still slightly afraid of NTFS and how it would get along with my backup drive.

As far as physically coexisting side by side, that will not be an issue.

There is a possibility that your backup method relies on the partitioning, and will only restore data to the same partition it was created from. This should not be the case with any reasonably modern backup software, but did occur for some older software. When the capacity of drives started to overtake CPU and device interface speeds, special steps were required to enable a backup to complete within a reasonable time. The result was that the backup copy was locked to a specific partition. When people found that out they usually abandoned that software, and chose something more flexible, even if it took longer to do the backup.

I would be very surprised if you are using backup software with that limitation. If you are, updating your backup procedure and doing a backup before you make the change will fix the problem.

 

[AnalogOldguy]

Hi Fellas,

I will first try formatting the 160 hard drive to 80GB FAT32.

One reason for this is because of the Drive Image 5 program I used to make images of C: I did this to save all the trouble of installing Windows and all the drivers, browsers, and the lost, very handy addons for Firefox, and bookmarks and plug ins for the browsers.

I have used it a couple of times before, and it takes about 5 minutes, while you just sit there examining your navel, then it reboots and you're back online.

It uses floppies that boot into a thing called Caldera DOS. Who knows if NTFS is compatible with (compressed) Images made with a strange version of DOS..

I'll make the Windows partition about 9GB (that's what the old one was) and I'll make two 32GB partitions. Totaling somewhat close to 80 Gig. Later, I could adjust with a partition manager, or the disk management in Windows.

The backups of World and Local were done with Solway's Plain Backup and are just plain copies, I think.

This might take a while, I wouldn't mind if you wandered away from this thread for a while. If this doesn't work, perhaps the next effort will be formatting in NTSF,

I have been fighting with my landlord all this week about a ventless natural gas heater he wanted to put into my apartment. I kept fighting him with words, and links to websites with information about the dangers. He finally said "please spare me the links I know what I am doing. Do you think I would subject my tenants to health hazards"?

I finally went to City Hall and yes, in my city at least, and I believe my state, unvented gas space heaters (even space-aged high tech blue flame ones) are not allowed without a permanently installed VENTED heater as the primary source of heat. I told him to call the Inspection Department and talk to a certain inspector there.

So now,a proper new vented heater sits in my home. But I am drained from the battle. I might take a while to regain the desire to tackle the formatting. I'll be back eventually. Best wishes and thanks to all of you! Bob.