Just a quick rundown of what I'm trying to do here:
I have a 1 TB external USB SimpleDrive hard drive that is currently partitioned into three partitions, two formatted with FAT32 and one formatted with HFS+ for Time Machine. I learned how to enable Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard's NTFS read-write capability today and so I no longer need to keep my first two partitions as FAT32 (especially since I have files larger than 4 GB I would like to store on them). I have data on the first FAT32 partition that I would like to transfer to the second FAT32 partition once I have reformatted it as NTFS whereby I will then be able to reformat the first FAT32 partition to NTFS without losing my data.
I have nothing important on the second FAT32 partition, but when I opened Disk Management in Administrative Tools in Windows 7, I found that the second FAT32 partition is currently set as the active partition of that volume. When I right-clicked and asked to Format that partition exclusively, I received the following message:
So, reading that, I decided it would be ideal to set my other FAT32 partition as active, but when I right-clicked and asked to Mark Partition as Active, I received the following message:
My intuition is telling me that it would be okay to set the first partition as active because I never have my USB drive boot initially since there is no OS installed on it, but I am not sure and I do not want to lose data, ruin my disk, or otherwise screw anything up.
Should I set the first FAT32 partition as active through Disk Management and then format my other FAT32 partition as NTFS?
I have a 1 TB external USB SimpleDrive hard drive that is currently partitioned into three partitions, two formatted with FAT32 and one formatted with HFS+ for Time Machine. I learned how to enable Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard's NTFS read-write capability today and so I no longer need to keep my first two partitions as FAT32 (especially since I have files larger than 4 GB I would like to store on them). I have data on the first FAT32 partition that I would like to transfer to the second FAT32 partition once I have reformatted it as NTFS whereby I will then be able to reformat the first FAT32 partition to NTFS without losing my data.
I have nothing important on the second FAT32 partition, but when I opened Disk Management in Administrative Tools in Windows 7, I found that the second FAT32 partition is currently set as the active partition of that volume. When I right-clicked and asked to Format that partition exclusively, I received the following message:
So, reading that, I decided it would be ideal to set my other FAT32 partition as active, but when I right-clicked and asked to Mark Partition as Active, I received the following message:
My intuition is telling me that it would be okay to set the first partition as active because I never have my USB drive boot initially since there is no OS installed on it, but I am not sure and I do not want to lose data, ruin my disk, or otherwise screw anything up.
Should I set the first FAT32 partition as active through Disk Management and then format my other FAT32 partition as NTFS?
