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Creating a partition on an external HD for an encrypted Volume
jdd:
I am looking for recommended software to create an NTFS partition on a FAT32 external hard drive without losing data?
The purpose of this is to use Truecrypt to create an encrypted Volume larger than the 4 Gig limit allowed on a FAT32 drive.
f0dder:
You'll need something that supports splitting the container file in multiple less-than-4GB files (never looked into whether TrueCrypt supports this, but I don't think so - it's not something I'd work hard to support as a developer.)
Why don't you just move from FAT32 to NTFS though?
jdd:
Fodder, I want to move from FAT32 to NTFS. That is why I want to know how to make an NTFS partition on the FAT32 external hard drive.
f0dder:
If you don't need the external drive to be in FAT32, use the windows "convert" tool to convert it from FAT32 to NTFS. Nondestructive and fast :)
CWuestefeld:
I think that the terminology might be confusing things here.
There's no such thing as a "FAT32 hard drive". That's really shorthand for saying "A HD with a partition that is formatted as a FAT32 file system".
Once you pull this apart, you'll see that in order to get to the "NTFS" part of your request, you need to have a partition to format with that file system.
The "normal" way of getting to that is by creating a new partition on the hard disk; tools like Partition Magic will let you resize your existing partition (the one formatted FAT), letting you create a new partition in the freed-up space, which you can then format as you like.
An alternative way to get a new partition is to create one that's visible through a separate driver like TrueCrypt's. TC can look at a "real" partition as I described above, or it can handle a "virtual" partition that exists within a file stored within another filesystem. But in this latter case, the TC file must, of course, conform to the rules of the file system that contains it. And that means that you're stuck with 4GB on FAT32.
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