Is there any negative in changing an external hard drive from FAT32 to NFTS?

I have a 500 GB external hard drive,
Western Digital, that is formatted as FAT32.  I have tried to save some movie files in Moviemak
er  from the External file to a file in a second internal hard drive so I can then edit in Premier but it says there isn't enough
space.  The new internal hard drive is a Terabyte and has lots of space.  The C drive is almost full.  I want to reformat the external drive to NTFS.  Is there any downside to that?
My PC has XP pro, 4 G Ram.  My problems come from trying to convert files because of missing codecs.  Yet when I analyze them with Gspot- it says nothing is missing.
Thanks
Pam

Pam,
What you actually want to do is Convert. The term "format" is used, when referring to FAT-32 and NTSF, but the operations are different. Convert should NOT harm the drive, or losse any data. I have done this with dozens of externals, without any incident. However, I have to admit that most of these are brand new, with no real data - so I am less concerned. When I have Converted older drives, I have made a backup - just in case, but still have never had one issue, or even one lost, or damaged file.
This ARTICLE goes into more detail. Also, please check your particular OS version's Help Files. That article was done a few OS versions ago, and there could be small, but important changes, especially in the parameters.
Good luck,
Hunt

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