Windows Explorer Not Responding

Night Hawk said:

You'll find something and likely for under $1,000 if you shop smartly! As for the I5s, I7s those are mainly desktop cpus since portables have a different line-up to look over for both Intel and AMD alike.

Laptop cooling will be another item to look at depending on how large the make and model you go with will be. The investment in a good notepad, laptop cooling pad for continuos use will be a plus to keep those temps down! A friend just had to replace a recently added in replacement drive when that llkely cooked since a slow running fan on the stand it was supposed to sit was dragging or the laptop wasn't placed on it during steady use.

Thanks, i'll look into it. :)
There is this another issue i have in this laptop which also started recently. the Disc Drive. It appears sometimes (the drive icon, in "my computer") but other times its gone...! not there!?! this drive has dvd multi-recorder, ultra-speed and rewritable written on it (on the outside of the drive, where the button is) and so the drive was pretty good at playing 99% of things i used to give it but, today it does not play some discs it used to... i havent used it for a long time, as you know we dont really use discs so much now do we?
i am posting this as a new matter as well, so whatever is convenient to you..:)

and as a general information, as i need to do this here, "formatting"..
i have a HDD (external) but its FAT32, i made a small mistake of not formatting the drive before adding the data to it.. now i have some files over 4 GB and as you know, they wouldnt get into it!! i need to format it now to NTFS BUT WITHOUT LOOSING data.. i am too scared because i have gone through one very frustrating situation before when the windows converted a very large number of my files in the hdd to .CHK and hid them in the hdd....... that is checking error and bad sectors of the hdd (as is what was said by the windows dialog box). i still couldnt recover my most most important files from those (literally exactly) 30000 .CHK files..!!
ofcourse i'll be posting this too..

thanks again, you are a real help!
Juniorgeek

Copy the data back off the drive, reformat to NTFS, copy the data back on to it. No need to complicate the process or add unnecessary risk if you've had problems converting filesystems before.

Night Hawk said:

Bought an external with a factory Fat volume with the label on the box showing compatible with Windows and Mac. The first thing most seem to forget is reading the manual where it recommends reformatting it to NTFS if using it strictly for Windows.

Fortunately there are ways to see the Fat converted over to NTFS without losing data. How to Convert a FAT32 Jump Drive to NTFS Without Losing Data | eHow.com

You can find several references on how to see this done. Another is seen at How To: Convert FAT To NTFS Without Losing Data | TomsTricks.Com

There are even some programs that will do this as well as convert NTFS to Fat. One is called Aomei seen at NTFS to FAT32 Converter: Convert NTFS to FAT32 without Losing Data | Reformat, Format to FAT32.

I would advise looking over the first guide in particular since the eHow site generally has some good guides for various things to find there. Someone even posted a YouTube clip on how to convert your external HD or flash drive over from Fat to NTFS.

Thanks alot, Night Hawk.
umm... you didnt say anything about the disc drive i mentioned above.

i have a 320 GB HDD and its almost full..... can i assure myself by some way that if i follow the right way, without doing anything wrong, i can achieve the thing right without loosing data? (worried)
as you may have an idea, i will confirm it - yes, i do not have any temp position to move my data somewhere, even for backup we do need the same amount of space, right?? eg, i have 300 GB of data then i have to have 300 GB free space somewhere to backup my data...??

Sounds like you need a bigger hard drive, then. Running so close to your space limitations can make issues like this unnecessarily more troublesome than they need to be. There's no shortage of 1TB external drives on sale these days going for $80-$100.

I too would be worried. What if that drive decides it's time for toast. Always better to have at least 2 copies of all personal data. And as FliGi7 mentioned each of your drives/partitions should have adequate free space to work with.

If you've really got to do it, it's easy to convert the FS to NTFS. It's really always best to format as NTFS to begin with to avoid fragmentation of the MFT after conversion. That said, I've converted many drives to NTFS, without losing any data, with the following command in a command prompt:

convert x: /fs:ntfs /v

(where x: refers to the correct drive letter, you can add a /nosecurity switch if you want all users to have access to the files):

convert x: /fs:ntfs /v /nosecurity

There's an additional switch (/cvtarea:<FileName>) that can be used to help reduce fragmentation of the MFT. You can read on how to use it by entering the following in a command window:

convert /?

Again though, it's always better to have the data copied elsewhere, just in case. And even better just formatting fresh to NTFS.

The convert process may require a certain amount of free space to work with, so if you do decide to give it a shot I'd recommend first moving enough data elsewhere in order to have about 10 to 15% free space. Also make sure there are no files in use on the disk.

Night Hawk said:

juniorgeek said:

Night Hawk said:

Bought an external with a factory Fat volume with the label on the box showing compatible with Windows and Mac. The first thing most seem to forget is reading the manual where it recommends reformatting it to NTFS if using it strictly for Windows.

Fortunately there are ways to see the Fat converted over to NTFS without losing data. How to Convert a FAT32 Jump Drive to NTFS Without Losing Data | eHow.com

You can find several references on how to see this done. Another is seen at How To: Convert FAT To NTFS Without Losing Data | TomsTricks.Com

There are even some programs that will do this as well as convert NTFS to Fat. One is called Aomei seen at NTFS to FAT32 Converter: Convert NTFS to FAT32 without Losing Data | Reformat, Format to FAT32.

I would advise looking over the first guide in particular since the eHow site generally has some good guides for various things to find there. Someone even posted a YouTube clip on how to convert your external HD or flash drive over from Fat to NTFS.

Thanks alot, Night Hawk.
umm... you didnt say anything about the disc drive i mentioned above.

i have a 320 GB HDD and its almost full..... can i assure myself by some way that if i follow the right way, without doing anything wrong, i can achieve the thing right without loosing data? (worried)
as you may have an idea, i will confirm it - yes, i do not have any temp position to move my data somewhere, even for backup we do need the same amount of space, right?? eg, i have 300 GB of data then i have to have 300 GB free space somewhere to backup my data...??

The best advice is simply to leave it as Fat 32 for the present time until you are able to back everything up onto a larger capacity drive. 300gb would cramp any 320gb from the start where at least a drive with a larger amount of free space available could temporarily hold everything for you in order to see the drive reformatted rather then converted. A drive will some 400gb free would help for the 300gb of data.

Whenever you have data present on a drive and not backed up somewhere else you risk losing it if something should go wrong during the conversion of Fat to NTFS or when going ro resize the existing volume on the drive whether shrinking or expanding a partition can falter if the Partition Table information loses something.

Once you do have a larger drive either bought new or borrowed temporarily and can back up the 300gb onto it then go ahead in convert or reformat the drive. The best move is simply cleaning the Factory volume off of it entirely and create a brand new NTFS partition once you know all files are good where they were backed up to. Sometimes backups can falter and lose files on you.

And once again i would thank you for your great help.!
i got everything i needed without being in any kinda trouble and all info came from real person! what can be greater than that!
hmm... btw i would like to add you as a friend if you dont mind...??
the reason? well, one -> because you have helped me a lot and a person like that i wouldnt really wanna walk away.....
second -> making new friends is a good thing! plus i choose friends and dont just make 'em.... so
so... the offer is for you...

F5ing said:

I too would be worried. What if that drive decides it's time for toast. Always better to have at least 2 copies of all personal data. And as FliGi7 mentioned each of your drives/partitions should have adequate free space to work with.

If you've really got to do it, it's easy to convert the FS to NTFS. It's really always best to format as NTFS to begin with to avoid fragmentation of the MFT after conversion. That said, I've converted many drives to NTFS, without losing any data, with the following command in a command prompt:

convert x: /fs:ntfs /v

(where x: refers to the correct drive letter, you can add a /nosecurity switch if you want all users to have access to the files):

convert x: /fs:ntfs /v /nosecurity

There's an additional switch (/cvtarea:<FileName>) that can be used to help reduce fragmentation of the MFT. You can read on how to use it by entering the following in a command window:

convert /?

Again though, it's always better to have the data copied elsewhere, just in case. And even better just formatting fresh to NTFS.

The convert process may require a certain amount of free space to work with, so if you do decide to give it a shot I'd recommend first moving enough data elsewhere in order to have about 10 to 15% free space. Also make sure there are no files in use on the disk.

hmm.. i see, thanks for the info..
i'll look into it.
definitely, dont want a "data-Toast" !!! hehe