A couple of months ago, I got tired of Windows running ScanDisk every time the power failed (which, living in Tampa, means at least once per thunderstorm). So I decided to convert my primary drive from FAT32 to NTFS, which (apart from eliminating the need for ScanDisk) is purportedly more efficient on large drives.

Unfortunately, that latter bit only applies to drives originally formatted as NTFS, not to drives converted from FAT32. I ended up with a drive that ran at about a tenth the speed of my secondary drive (which was formatted as NTFS). Absolutely unacceptable.

The solution, I thought, was simple. Just XCOPY the contents of my C: drive into a subdirectory of my D: drive, reformat the C: drive, then XCOPY everything back. Easy peasy.

Wrong. XCOPY won't touch opened files — so the registry databases, which have all my application settings, wouldn't be copied. Not wanting to reinstall every single application, I wrote a program to replace XCOPY; it still couldn't open the registry databases (access denied).

Simple to get around, I thought. Just boot from an XP startup disk, so no files on the hard drive would be open. Ah, but the startup disk provides no NTFS support, so I could neither read nor write to the hard drives.

Well, that should be no trouble, I thought foolishly. Back in my OS/2 days, I'd installed all sorts of freeware filesystem drivers, including NTFS. Ah, but that was OS/2. I found plenty of freeware NTFS drivers for DOS, but all of them were read-only. I did find one read/write driver, but it cost $299, which quite frankly I didn't intend to pay for a one-time use.

So I pulled the drives out of my machine, stuck them into Karen's, and did the XCOPY. Worked like a charm, since none of the files on my primary drive were open — except the numbers didn't add up.

I'd forgotten to use the command-line switch that copied empty directories. No big deal, though I was surprised to find that there were 1,318 of them (out of a total of 35,189 directories). The odd part is that the copy contained 119 more files than the original. Now to figure out where the files are, and what they contain, before I wipe out the C: drive.

I discovered one other thing during this ordeal, of which I was previously unaware: hard drives run hot! I'm not sure if it's normal or not, but they were nearly hot enough to burn my fingers. Looks like it's time for a second case fan.