Thank you very much for the info RC_Razor. what if my win2k crashes and I want to boot from a floppy? is there a bootdisk that can access an NTFS? if there is, then I'll probably have to repartition my HDD to NTFS since everything you've said sums up everything to the NTFS being way much better than FAT/FAT32.

Your new partitions should be NTFS. It's more reliable and can handle larger files. Contrary to earlier posts, it's FAT32 that has a 2GB-per-file limit, the limit for NTFS is much higher.

I generally reserve about a 10 GB partition for Windows, the rest for data. The data partition should be NTFS, too - but be aware that on a slower machine it's more overhead. There are ways to speed it up, see Disable the NTFS Last Access Time Stamp for an example.

http://www.ntfs.com/boot-disk.htm has a free-download floppy disk image that, when expanded to a floppy, creates a bootable disk that will allow you to copy files from an NTFS partition to a FAT32 partition (or another hard drive) or a network. The site has other utilities as well, both free and for pay. The Knoppix CD will allow you to do the same thing, if you're able to boot from a CD.

I thought it was 4GB for FAT32 and unlimited for NTFS. Not to offend anyone thats just what I thought....

No offense taken. Actually there is often some confusion about this. As far as I have been able to determine, one bit is reserved for offset (used to indicate whether seeking forward or backwards in a file), which limits an individual file to 2 GB.

is that 2 GB for FAT32 or NTFS???