Problem XP install..........

I just put a new 40GB HDD in and XP is not co-operating ! I was going to do a clean install as I had done an upgrade to start with and it was a little buggy,I put it on top of Me,to start with when I went to install it wanted to see a previous version of Windows and all I had from Me was a restore disk which would not work so after I dug out a 98se to show it I finaly got to a partition dialogue no prob.Went to format and all it would let me do was NTFS , what is up with that ? I will probably go to this one of these days but for now I had planed on staying with FAT32,has anyone else run into this ?I thought you still should have an option of the two with XP. If I go ahead and change to NTFS will files I have saved in FAT32 for backup still work? Help!!!!

well if you have a brand new hard drive just fdisk it to FAT32. then navigate the i386 folder to start the win xp installation from the disc. a screen will ask you if you want to convert the partition to NTFS, just simply say no. good luck

they should still work, where did you back them up ? correct me if I'm wrong, but the file system doesn't really affect files, it's just how they are placed and how much space they occupy, so after you install in NTFS ( if you install in NTFS) just copy your old stuff to your new hard drive. there will be a problem though if you have another version of Windows that isn'T XP, 2000 or NT on that backup drive, as these other versions (Win9x or Win3.x and DOS), these won't be able to see the new 40 gig HD. But if on your comp you only have 1 version of Windows installed, then it should be fine

O.K. after much deep thought and a little research I went ahead and did NTFS,it seems like the best way to go and I'm a fool for trying something new. Besides it is made for XP or vice versa.Thanks for the help and input