I generally format new USB drives NTFS as soon as I get them because for some reason they all still come formatted Fat32. You don't really notice this until you try to copy something large to them and then you get an error saying the file is too large for the file system.
I tried to copy a large virtual machine hard drive to one that I have that is already full of stuff today (I'm creating images for an MMS lab that will hopefully be approved!) and I got that error....#$%^&
I didn't want to format the entire drive and lose all of the information already on it, so I had to dig into my bag of tricks and use the DOS command Convert. This is actually a pretty fast process and saves the data already present on the drive-which is a plus. I converted a 80GB drive to NTFS in around five minutes.
To use this command, you just open a command prompt (if you're running Windows Vista you'll need to open the command prompt running as administrator) and convert away. You'll be prompted for the volume label of the drive to convert, so you need to know that as well.
It's a fairly simple process to convert the drive from FAT32 to NTFS using the CONVERT command and its syntax is shown below:
I think this is equivalent to the quick format option, I'm not positive, but I'll be reformatting this drive "the hard way" later just to make sure everything is copasetic in the future.