"John H." wrote in message
...
I have a 160 GB external hard disk to which I tried to back up my documents
and settings using the Windows backup system.

After about a half hour, I get a message saying there's not enough room
for
the backup, and that if the hard disk is FAT 32, the backup can be no
larger than 4 GB. So I checked, and sure enough, the external HD is FAT
32.

Now what? I already have about 50 GB of stuff on the external HD that I
don't want to lose by reformatting (if that's what's required).
--
John H

"All decisions are the result of binary thinking."

There are some utilities like "Partition Magic" that will allow you to
resize/create partitions without losing data, of course no guarantees. If
the backed up data is just that, a backup then the data you're concerned
about is still on your main HDD(s).

With on the partition utilities you could create a new partition on your
160GB HDD, format this new partition as NTFS, move the data from the FAT32
partition, reformat the FAT32 partition to NTFS.