The only way I know of to do that is to reformat it. You could use norton ghost, to ghost an image then reformat it NTFS, then ghost the image back.

I'd love to do that, but I don't have any place to store an 80gig ghost file. Thanks anyway.

Your whole HD is full?!?!
 
Ghost only makes a copy of the data.

Yes, as amazing as it may sound... I have filled up 80gig of space. I do a lot of 3D work... and with some texture files taking up as much as 20mb of space, an 80gig HDD doesn't seem as large as you once thought it could be.
Yeah I know, I use ghost on my primary HDD.

It is a PHYSICAL IMPOSSIBILITY to convert from NTFS to FAT32 without re-formatting. The NTFS directory structure is a lot different than that of FAT32, so the only way to re-construct a FAT32 file system on an NTFS partition would be a re-format. For more information on File Systems and their differences, check out these links:
[File Systems in general]
http://www.pcnineoneone.com/howto/filesystems1.html
[FAT16/32]
http://www.pcnineoneone.com/howto/fat1.html
 
By the way, why do u need to convert to FAT32? I thought NTFS is a lot better. The only reason i can see is you're either running Linux and want read/write access, or you're running Win9x/Me (yuck!)

Great... I am able to convert my 13 and 20 gig drives from NTFS to FAT32 using partition magic, but it won't allow me to do this with the 80 gig drive.
NTFS may be a lot better, but it appears to be a lot slower (it is noticable), that's the main reason why I want to convert back to FAT32, and yes, I am running linux and W2K, and no I'm not running 98 or ME.

I c. Well in that case, I would try the following (if at all possible):
 
Split your hard drive into say the following:
 
2 x 20GB partitions
and 1 x 40 GB partition.
 
Then while you're at it, in partition magic, format those 20 GB partitions as FAT32,
THEN use partition magic to merge those two partitions together. This way, YES you'll still have an NTFS partition, BUT at least part of your hard drive would be FAT32.
I'm afraid that if you want the WHOLE 80 GB to be FAT32, you'll HAVE to reformat it completeley as FAT32, or delete its partition and re-create it as FAT32 in FDISK. In either way you'd lose all your data! Sorry! :-(

Unfortuantly the hard disk is almost full, so the partition splitting isn't much of an option. Thanks for the suggestions anyway. I really appreciate it.
What I find amazing is that microsoft can provide a utility which can convert FAT32 to NTFS, yet can't provide one which does the reverse?

Well the fact of the matter is that you PHYSICALLY CANNOT convert an NTFS partition into a FAT32 regardless of whether Microsoft or even REDHAT for that matter can come up with a program to do it. Once you convert to NTFS there's no turning back unless you format. If you even TRY to convert an NTFS parititon to a FAT32 your data MAY BE CORRUPTED! the reason being is that NTFS stores file in a completely different way than FAT32 and it also has "extensions" o properties for EACH FILE that cannot be preserved in FAT32. NTFS works entirely on those properties One other thing too, is NTFS has built-in features to recover data that may be corrupted or on the verge of eing lost. If I where you, I'd stick to NTFS, and just mount it under Linux as a read-only device! Yes, its brutal for linux to not be able to access the device in read/write mode, but its better than nothing!
I would STRONGLY suggest staying with NTFS for many reasons! As for performance issues, FAT32 may be faster than NTFS but its not THAT much faster. For example, if you open a program in 4 seconds in FAT32 as opposed to 6 or 7 in NTFS its no big deal right? we can wait for 3 more seconds for the program right? LOL.
good luck! let us know how it goes!

Quote:
Well the fact of the matter is that you PHYSICALLY CANNOT convert an NTFS partition into a FAT32 regardless of...

For my part I would be very interested in which of the above statements is true, as I don't know whom to believe. Could you sort it out without any hurt feelings ? Anybody here (except Jedi O.)that has successfully converted from NTFS to FAT32 ??

H.

I have succesfully done so, but ONLY with a COMPLETE format of the partition. Ready my above post, AND also read the links provided on it and I'm sure you'll agree with me!

Not to throw this thread into more chaos, but I've heard that Partition Magic 7 allows you to convert from NTFS to FAT32 w/o reformatting (why on earth you'd pay money for the program if you wanted to do NTFS to FAT32 w/o formatting and it didn't do it is beyond me)

Well partition magic has some other cool features such as merging partitons, splitting partitions, splitting partitions and automatically formatting them with a variety of file systems, and converting between file systems, ALL WITHOUT ANY LOSS OF DATA!
Anyways, I am still convinced that a conversion from NTFs->Fat32 is almost impossible without a format with good reasons! Please check the links on my post above and I'm sure they'll support my point of view.
Anyways, Good luck. Please let us know how it goes with you
 
Note: don't get me wrong here, I am only trying to help in here. I do not mean to get into a cyber fist fight or anything, LOL

Likewise... I don't want to start a cyberwar over this, but I have used partition magic 7 to convert from NTFS to FAT32 without any loss of data, on my 13 and 20gig hdd's. But as I said, it will not allow me to do this with the 80gig. I have read somewhere (I forget where) that it PM doesn't actually convert the file system, just writes a new header to the disk which tricks it into thinking that there has been a conversion. I don't know how true this is though, and if it is true, I don't see why it wouldn't work with the 80gig drive either.

IOs it because of the 80Gb size, or because your disk is too full for the conversion? Sometime disk file system vonversion can require some free space to succeed. Unless of course, there's a problem with it simply being too large (80 gigs)