Hi, all. I have a Dell XPS R400 with a second Western Digital HDD (40GB) that I added a long time ago myself. I'm running W2K Pro. The drive is FAT32 and is used only for data storage. No installed programs on it, no system files on it as far as I can tell. I want to convert (not format, still some files on it, but not critical) it to NTFS, but I wonder if there might be a disk management utility on it.
How can I tell the maximum size of HDD this system will accept without a disk management program?
Thanks.

By a "disk management utility" we presume you mean drive overlay that allows a disk that is too large for the current BIOS to utilise all of the available HDD space.

The BIOS is the most common reason for such limitations and the two most common "barriers" have recently been the 8.4 and 33.8 GB ones. Nowadays the 28bit LBA (or ATA) barrier is, more commonly, affecting drives over 137.4 GB.

If your drive falls between one of these landmarks then it is more than probable that you can use drives at least as far as the next of these common barriers.

I don't know of an easy way to know what one's current BIOS version would support other than searching the mobo's support pages or by trial and error.

BTW, it may have been a typo, but you can only convert partitions and not some files on a partition to NTFS.

Yes, I want to convert the entire partition. I just may end up backing up all the rest of the files on it and place it on an ATA controller card and then formating it NTFS. Probably better idea than converting to NTFS.