Quote Originally Posted by brokencrow View Post
How different is the newer version of NTFS than the old?
It's slightly different. Vista's NTFS has transactional NTFS support among other things.

I formatted a disk w/ a Vista CD and installed XP. It seemed to run OK but I had some controller-matrix driver issues. Looks like I've got to redo this whole shebang from what I can tell.
While the different NTFS versions are for the most part fully forward- and backward-compatible, there are technical considerations for mounting newer NTFS volumes in older versions of Microsoft Windows. This affects dual-booting, and external portable hard drives.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTFS

Is it possible to damage a drive using the wrong file system?
No, but the filesystem itself might get mangled..