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Just a quick question - How wise (or unwise, as it were) is it to have a drive booting into XP from FAT32 with an NTFS partition for storing data and whatnot?
In the past, I've managed to seriously screw up a drive playing around with this, but that was mainly because I was playing around with the boot flags.
In general, XP seems to be happier and runs a bit more efficiently on NTFS. FAT32 is a little lighter, but less secure and less fault tolerant in general. Additionally, certain features rely solely on NTFS to operate...such as encrypted files, large file support, and the full file indexing service.
However, there really isn't anything physically wrong with running two different parition types on one drive. Heck, I'm running 2 NTFS, a FAT32, 2 Linux Ext3, and a Linux swap parition on a single drive. :p It works just fine.
EDIT: Oh, a FAT32 boot and NTFS data drive...that should work. One of my roommates ran his computer that way for a while. Don't see why you wouldn't want to make the bootable parition into NTFS though.
Ah thanks, just thought I should check. Though after reading up on it, I've found there's a way to convert the whole lot to NTFS with a little DOS utility called convert.exe. :p
FAT32 is a good way to share files across multiple filesystems. That's how I share files between NTFS and reiserFS or ext3. The only downside is that it has a 4GiB file size limit and a file limit of around 265,000,000 (which should be more than enough ;) )
Yeah, the 4GB filesize limit is the reason I wanted to change. It's the first time I've ever needed it; to rip an ISO of a dual layer DVD disc.