FAT32 Conversion to NTFS

[Mike]

I'm thinking of converting to NTFS from Fat32. Has anyone
done it and if you did were your files intact after the
conversion. Thanks for any comments.

[Neil Cooper]

"Mike" > wrote in message
...
> I'm thinking of converting to NTFS from Fat32. Has anyone
> done it and if you did were your files intact after the
> conversion. Thanks for any comments.

Just done it today and no problems. Everything running fine.

Neil

[[email protected]]

Be sure you read this first:

http://aumha.org/a/ntfscvt.php

if partition alignment is not right you'll end up with 512 byte clusters
and ntfs will be slow slow slow... You want it to end up w/ 4K clusters.

My advice: if it ain't broke don't fix it! If you don't NEED file
protection [access rights control] or encryption then ntfs isn't really
necessary, just "nicer".

If you do convert, make sure you've installed the Recovery Console into
your boot menu so you can at least get at the files on the disk from a
command prompt; booting w/ a DOS floppy won't read ntfs. Look in Help and
Support under "recovery console" on how to install it into the boot menu.

[Bruce Chambers]

Greetings --

Personally, I wouldn't even consider using FAT32 when NTFS is an
option. FAT32 has no security capabilities, no compression
capabilities, no fault tolerance, and a lot of wasted hard drive space
on volumes larger than 8 Gb in size. But your computing needs may
vary, and there is no hard and fast answer.

To answer your questions without getting too technical is
difficult, but has been handled quite well by Alex Nichol in the
article here:

FAT & NTFS File Systems in Windows XP
http://www.aumha.org/a/ntfs.htm

Somewhat more technical information is here:

Limitations of the FAT32 File System in Windows XP
http://support.microsoft.com/directory/article.asp?ID=kb;en-us;Q314463

Choosing Between File Systems
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/treeview/default.asp?url=/TechNet/prodtechnol/winntas/tips/techrep/filesyst.asp

You can safely convert your hard drive to NTFS whenever desired,
without having to format the partition and reinstall everything. As
always when performing any serious changes, back up any important data
before proceeding, just in case. A little advance preparation is also
strongly recommended, so you can avoid any performance hits caused by
the default cluster size:

Converting FAT32 to NTFS in Windows
http://www.aumha.org/a/ntfscvt.htm


Bruce Chambers

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having both at once. -- RAH


"Mike" > wrote in message
...
> I'm thinking of converting to NTFS from Fat32. Has anyone
> done it and if you did were your files intact after the
> conversion. Thanks for any comments.