Well I know XP is native to NTFS but I have heard from someone that has told me that if I reboot without going to Start -> Log Off -> Reboot, or Shut Down -> Turn Off, that it could fry the HD? Is that BS? I currently do that all the time and have NTFS on my system running XP Pro but if that's true it's not that big of a deal because it is only a 600 MHz AMD Duron with 30 Gb of space, but this new PC, I wanna take any precaution I can to protect my investment.
Ive not heard that one! For ages I didnt even log off before I shutdown..... I do now cos of the way ive got my desktop set up.. I dont see how it can damage anything.
You don't need to log off before shutting down, unless you switched users during your session. In that case, I say you should switch back and then shut down. I highly doubt it would fry your hdd if you do that, but I do think it could mess up your settings if and only if you switched users during one session (using the switch user button instead of logging off and logging back on with another user) And I'd use NTFS over FAT32. It's more secure and I've always said that when it comes to hdds, security should always come first.
I've done that so many times and have yet to fry a hard drive. Whoever was saying that had someother hardware problem that happened right after that, or is on crack. If they were using an IBM Dethstar 75GXP or 60GXP hard drive, I could understand it going under, but that's because they were just a bad set of hard drives, and the problems causing them to fail were not based on what filesystem is used. NTFS is vastly superior to FAT32 for the large drives out today. FAT32 is only good for a harddrive/partition up to about 32GB. You can make a drive larger, but you'll start taking hits. NTFS is very good, and is not going to nuke your hard drive if you use it.
