NTFS and FAT32

Today I have upgraded from ME TO XP. Because I did it from Windows, I was not asked to use NTFS file system. Any idea how can I format that partition to NTFS instead of the current FAT32? or is that impossible without deleting everything on it? my Ghost 2002 can not handle destination drives formatted with NTFS.

And I need someone please to tell me what are the advantages of NTFS compared to FAT32?
does it make XP perform faster?

 

 
 
Help will tell you how to convert to NTFS. You may want to reconsider.

Using XP's convert command will change your entire drive over to NTFS, but the cluster size will be 512bytes. This small cluster size may cause a variable performance hit and will result in faster fragmentation of your drive.

It is best to use 4k clusters with NTFS. That would be the default size if you had not upgraded, but had installed to a clean drive (best idea).

You can convert the drive first to FAT32 with 4k aligned clusters using Partition Magic, then from there to 4k NTFS, if you have PM and don't wish to install cleanly.

Only the option to install to a blank disk involves any data loss (unless something goes wrong, of course).

NTFS is less prone to error, fragments more slowly, and offers a number of security features (sign in or not, anyone with a 98/ME boot disk can access anything on a FAT32 drive).
Here is a brief comparison table:
http://www.ntfs.com/ntfs_vs_fat.htm