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#31
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Virtual Machine and NTFS
glee wrote:
You can force the cluster size....it just means there is a ridiculously large number of clusters on a drive that size, and among other things, most drive tools will not work on a drive with that many clusters (scandisk, defrag, drive diagnostic apps). DOS scandisk has no problems scanning volumes with many millions of clusters (120 million was the most I've tried and it worked). Windows ME versions of defrag and scandisk (scandskw + diskmaint.dll) have a cut-off somewhere around 28 to 32 million clusters. The Windows ME versions of scandisk and defrag are frequently transplanted into tweaked Win-98 installations. MS-DOS version of Fdisk (may 2000 update) has a limit of 512 gb (that's the largest drive that it can correctly partition). There is something called "Free Fdisk" that can partition larger drives (at least 750 gb, and probably up to 1 tb). MS-DOS format.com can format volumes of up to 1024 gb (1 tb). |
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#32
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Virtual Machine and NTFS
On 10/18/2010 10:20 AM, glee wrote:
"Bill in Co" wrote in message m... glee wrote: "Bill in Co" wrote in message m... We could get into a debate on this, but with someone posing as "Philo is wrong", one wonders if it would be worth it. Are you "98guy" in disguise? :-) I'd say that's quite likely, if not outright obvious. A 500GB SATA drive as a single 4KB-cluster FAT32 partition, running Win98? Who else do we know that does this and recommends it? ;-) Maybe I'm forgetting something, but I seem to recall that as the partition size got bigger, the cluster size also HAD to get larger (up to 32K max) to keep the maximum allowable number of clusters within the max 16 bit value (65,536) for FAT32. So how could one possibly have 4 KB clusters on a 500 GB volume with FAT32? You can force the cluster size....it just means there is a ridiculously large number of clusters on a drive that size, and among other things, most drive tools will not work on a drive with that many clusters (scandisk, defrag, drive diagnostic apps). Not to mention that it will result in a ridiculously big FAT of about 500MB! Anyone who understands how the FAT is read in a linear fashion understands the folly of such a formatting scheme! This formatting scheme effectively ensures that much the disk structure will be paged out, what an incredible hit on disk performance! The disk is already the single biggest performance bottleneck on any computer and this silly formatting scheme will make it an even bigger bottleneck. Good thing 98Guy isn't handing out car advice, he would have us fill the bumpers with lead while claiming that the added ballast makes cars go faster while consuming less fuel... John |
#33
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Virtual Machine and NTFS
On 10/17/2010 11:15 AM, Philo is wrong (98Guy) wrote:
Additionally , since many people are now storing movies and such with large files sizes, fat32 cannot handle any files over 4 gigs. While that is true, it rarely comes up as a realistic or practical limitation for FAT32. The most common multimedia format in common use is the DVD .VOB file, which self-limit themselves to be 1 gb. People working with video editing and multimedia files often run across this 4GB file limitations. Backup/imaging utilities also often run into problems caused by this file size limitation, it is a very practical limitation of FAT32 and one that users often experience, people often post asking about this problem. The only file type that I ever see exceed the 4 gb size are virtual machine image files, which you will not see on a win-9x machine but you would see on an XP (or higher) PC running VM Ware, Microsoft Virtual PC, etc. But 4 gb should be enough to contain a modest image of a virtual windows-98 machine. Additionally, XP is *deliberately* crippled in that it cannot create a fat32 partition larger than 32 gigs. Windows XP cannot format partitions larger than 32GB to FAT32 because the increasing size of the FAT for bigger volumes makes these volumes less efficient and for performance reasons Microsoft decided to draw the line at 32GB for FAT32 volumes. [snip...] The extra sophistication and transaction journalling performed by NTFS reduces it's overall performance compared to FAT32. So for those who want to optimize the over-all speed of their PC's, FAT32 is a faster file system than NTFS. That is not completely true. FAT32 is generally faster on smaller volumes but on larger volumes NTFS is faster. This is why Microsoft decided to put a limit of 32GB on the size of volumes which can be formatted to FAT32 on Windows 2000 and later NT operating systems, the size of the FAT on larger volumes is a hindrance on performance and Microsoft decided that 32GB was an acceptable cut off point for FAT32 volumes. I do a lot of computer repair work and have seen entire fat32 file systems hosed by a bad shut down. The user, in attempt to fix things has typically run scandisk and *sometimes* has ended up with a drive full of .chk files. That's another common myth about FAT32 - that the appearance of many .chk files must mean that it's inferior to NTFS. While it might look untidy, the mere existance of those .chk files don't mean anything about how compentent or capable FAT32 is, and it's not hard to just delete them and get on with your business. You did not say in your example if the user's drive and OS was operable and functional despite the existance of those .chk files. These .chk files are lost file segments that the scandisk utility could not recover, damaged data! That the operating system remains "operable" is a laughable excuse if user data is lost! Open a user file on a FAT32 drive then while the user is making changes to his file yank the plug on the machine and tell us how well (or not) the user data survives such an event! What I am saying is that NTFS is considerably more resilient. What you don't understand about NTFS is that it will silently delete user-data to restore it's own integrity as a way to cope with a failed transaction, while FAT32 will create lost or orphaned clusters that are recoverable but who's existance is not itself a liability to the user or the file system. Citations please... John |
#34
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Virtual Machine and NTFS
In message , glee
writes: [] The second list are the operating systems you can install it on, as a host machine. I have read elsewhere that it will install and run on XP Home as well as Pro, but have never tried. That's what I thought. (Anyone else know?) The first list is what operating systems are "supported" to be run as a virtual system on the host. Other systems can be run....Win98, Linux, etc...they are just not "supported" , meaning you won't get any help or support for issues, there may not be Additions available for everything, or there may only be partial functionality of the unsupported virtual system. Yes, I thought so too (-:. [What's an "Addition" in this context?] -- J. P. Gilliver. UMRA: 1960/1985 MB++G.5AL-IS-P--Ch++(p)Ar@T0H+Sh0!:`)DNAf "The people here are more educated and intelligent. Even stupid people in Britain are smarter than Americans." Madonna, in RT 30 June-6July 2001 (page 32) |
#35
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Virtual Machine and NTFS
Virtual PC 2004 SP1
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/e...displaylang=en System Requirements Supported Operating Systems:Windows 2000 Service Pack 4 ;Windows Server 2003, Standard Edition (32-bit x86); Windows XP Service Pack 2 Processor: Athlon®, Duron®, Celeron®, Pentium® II, Pentium III, or Pentium 4 Processor speed: 400 MHz minimum (1 GHz or higher recommended) RAM: Add the RAM requirement for the host operating system that you will be using to the requirement for the guest operating system that you will be using. If you will be using multiple guest operating systems simultaneously, total the requirements for all the guest operating systems that you need to run simultaneously. Available disk space: To determine the hard disk space required, add the requirement for each guest operating system that will be installed. Virtual PC 2004 SP1 runs on: Windows 2000 Professional SP4, Windows XP Professional, and Windows XP Tablet PC Edition. |
#36
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Virtual Machine and NTFS
John John - MVP Win The Debate Hands Down!
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#37
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Virtual Machine and NTFS
Philo Surrenders wrote: philo top-poasted: I have probably over 200 years worth of FAT32 hard-drive usage experience This is how Philo surrenders an argument. Watch: 200 years of experience... ok you win, my computer experience only goes back to 1968. Because he didn't quote the rest of my statement: (if you add up all the years of service of various FAT32 drives that I've installed, maintained, touched in one way or another, etc) over the past dozen years. How stupid!! You truely should just keep quiet and leave with any dignity that may possibly remain. Buffalo |
#38
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Virtual Machine and NTFS
John John - MVP wrote:
People working with video editing and multimedia files often run across this 4GB file limitations. Backup/imaging utilities also often run into problems caused by this file size limitation, About 3 years ago I installed XP on a 250 gb FAT-32 partitioned hard drive and installed Adobe Premier CS3. It had no problems creating large video files that spanned the 4 gb file-size limit of FAT32. Windows XP cannot format partitions larger than 32GB to FAT32 because the increasing size of the FAT for bigger volumes makes these volumes less efficient (bla bla bla) Other than saying that this behavior was "by design", Microsoft has never said *why* they gave the NT line of OS's the handicap of not being able to create FAT32 volumes larger than 32 gb. It's a fallacy that the entire FAT must be loaded into memory by any OS (win-9x/XP, etc) for the OS to access the volume. Go ahead and cite some performance statistics that show that performance of random-size file read/write operations go down as the FAT size (# of clusters) goes up. Remember, we are not talking about cluster size here. FAT32 cluster size (and hence small file storage efficiency) can be exactly the same as NTFS regardless the size of the volume. |
#39
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Virtual Machine and NTFS
On Sun, 17 Oct 2010 10:02:22 +0100, "J. P. Gilliver (John)"
wrote: In message , mm writes: On Sat, 16 Oct 2010 07:16:58 -0500, philo wrote: On 10/16/2010 12:33 AM, mm wrote: Hi! I"m moving to a new machine that probably won't run win98, so I planned to run it from a Virtual Machine under winxpsp3 Is it okay to have all the harddrive partitions NTFS, even though win98 can't normally read NTFS? It should work just fine. If there are any problems they will not be due to the drive being NTFS at any rate Great, thank you. Now I have all the parts to fix up my friends old 2.4 gig Dell for myself. I think I'll like the increased speed. snip If you're actually starting from scratch (which "have all the parts" suggests to me that you are) anyway, received wisdom here seems to be I had everything but the harddrive, so yeah, I'm starting from scratch on that. Thanks. There is a lot of thread to read. Been very busy, but I'll have time soon, I think. I plan to get back to you. that you should set it up as FAT anyway: the alleged benefits of NTFS being largely moot for the single home user, and XP will operate perfectly happily under FAT. |
#40
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Virtual Machine and NTFS
On 10/18/2010 11:01 PM, Philo Pastry wrote:
John John - MVP wrote: People working with video editing and multimedia files often run across this 4GB file limitations. Backup/imaging utilities also often run into problems caused by this file size limitation, About 3 years ago I installed XP on a 250 gb FAT-32 partitioned hard drive and installed Adobe Premier CS3. It had no problems creating large video files that spanned the 4 gb file-size limit of FAT32. Windows XP cannot format partitions larger than 32GB to FAT32 because the increasing size of the FAT for bigger volumes makes these volumes less efficient (bla bla bla) Other than saying that this behavior was "by design", Microsoft has never said *why* they gave the NT line of OS's the handicap of not being able to create FAT32 volumes larger than 32 gb. Raymond Chen talks about this he Windows Confidential A Brief and Incomplete History of FAT32 http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/m...fidential.aspx It's a fallacy that the entire FAT must be loaded into memory by any OS (win-9x/XP, etc) for the OS to access the volume. Of course it's a fallacy and no one here said that the entire FAT had to be loaded in memory, what you don't understand is that the FAT is extensively accessed during disk operations and having it cached in the RAM is one of the most efficient methods of speeding up disk operations. You on the other hand seem to think that having the FAT as large as possible and then page it to disk is a smart thing to do... Why else would anyone format a 500gb FAT32 volume with 4K clusters? What exactly do you think that you will gain with this formatting scheme that will be so great as to dismiss the whopping performance hit provided by a 500MB FAT? John |
#41
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Virtual Machine and NTFS
John John - MVP wrote:
On 10/18/2010 11:01 PM, Philo Pastry wrote: John John - MVP wrote: People working with video editing and multimedia files often run across this 4GB file limitations. Backup/imaging utilities also often run into problems caused by this file size limitation, About 3 years ago I installed XP on a 250 gb FAT-32 partitioned hard drive and installed Adobe Premier CS3. It had no problems creating large video files that spanned the 4 gb file-size limit of FAT32. Windows XP cannot format partitions larger than 32GB to FAT32 because the increasing size of the FAT for bigger volumes makes these volumes less efficient (bla bla bla) Other than saying that this behavior was "by design", Microsoft has never said *why* they gave the NT line of OS's the handicap of not being able to create FAT32 volumes larger than 32 gb. Raymond Chen talks about this he Windows Confidential A Brief and Incomplete History of FAT32 http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/m...fidential.aspx It's a fallacy that the entire FAT must be loaded into memory by any OS (win-9x/XP, etc) for the OS to access the volume. Of course it's a fallacy and no one here said that the entire FAT had to be loaded in memory, what you don't understand is that the FAT is extensively accessed during disk operations and having it cached in the RAM is one of the most efficient methods of speeding up disk operations. You on the other hand seem to think that having the FAT as large as possible and then page it to disk is a smart thing to do... Why else would anyone format a 500gb FAT32 volume with 4K clusters? What exactly do you think that you will gain with this formatting scheme that will be so great as to dismiss the whopping performance hit provided by a 500MB FAT? John The idea of a having a super large, 500MB FAT, (that often has to be accessed sequentially, instead of in a B-tree), I find *wholly* repugnant!! |
#42
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Virtual Machine and NTFS
John John - MVP wrote:
Let's address your blatant lie: "What you don't understand about NTFS is that it will silently delete user-data to restore it's own integrity as a way to cope with a failed transaction..." It is you who doesn't understand anything about how NTFS works so you spread lies and nonsence! NTFS DOES NOT silently delete user data to replace it to restore it's own integrity and C. Quirke does not in anyway say that in his blog. Perhaps you have a reading comprehension problem. This is what Quirk says, and what I've experienced first-hand when I see IIS log file data being wiped away because of power failures: ----------- It also means that all data that was being written is smoothly and seamlessly lost. The small print in the articles on Transaction Rollback make it clear that only the metadata is preserved; "user data" (i.e. the actual content of the file) is not preserved. ----------- Do you understand the difference between metadata and "user data" ? What is being described is journaling and it is perfectly normal NTFS behaviour, this journaling ensures atomicity of the write operations. Journalling ensures the *complete-ness* of write operations. Partially completed writes are rolled back to their last complete state. That can mean that user-data is lost. You on the other hand seem to think that it is preferable to have the file system keep incomplete or corrupt write operations and then have scandisk run at boot time so that it may /try/ to recover lost clusters or so that it may save damaged file segments In my experience, drive reliability, internal caching and bad-sector re-mapping have made most of what NTFS does redundant. The odd thing is - I don't believe I've ever had to resort to scouring through .chk files for data that was actually part of any sort of user file that was corrupted. Any time I've come across .chk files, I've never actually had any use for them. And I can tell you that I would really be ****ed off if I was working on a file on an NTFS system and it suffered a power failure or some other sort of interruption and my file got journalled back to some earlier state just because the file system didn't fully journal it's present state or last write operation. I've seen too many examples of NT-server log files that contain actual and up-to-date data one hour, and because of a power failure the system comes back up and half the stuff that *was* in the log file is gone. That's an example of meta-data being preserved at the sake of user data. Chris mentions in his blog how data which was recovered by Scandisk should be treated as suspicious. Recovered - as in the creation of .chk files? Like I said, I've never had a use for them in the first place. The NTFS method is to use journaling instead to guarantee atomicity of the write operation, to guarantee that the write is complete and free of errors. No. You can still have erroneous write operations under NTFS and FATxx, and the OS is supposed to retry the operation until the write succeeds. If the write occurs during a system crash or power failure, there can be no re-try. Journalling is meant to detect an erroneous write event that was never corrected / completed and restore the file system to the previous state before the event, even if some (or most, or all) user data was in fact written to the drive prior to the failure but was not journaled. That's where FAT32 will retain the user data, but it will be lost under NTFS. And as Quirke says, under FAT you can have a mis-match between the file-size as recorded in the FAT vs the length of the file-chain, and for which is easily fixable. He talks a lot more about the relative complexity of the actual structure of NTFS compared to FAT32, the lack of proper documentation, of diagnostic and repair tools, and the idea that the MFT may not be as recoverable or redundant as the dual FATs of FAT32. What is especially interesting is that a faulty FAT32 volume can be mounted and inspected with confidence that it won't be immediately "attacked" by unknown or uncontrolled read/write operations during it's mounting as a faulty NTFS volume would be by NTFS.SYS. You basically have to trust that NTFS.SYS knows what it's doing, and that it knows best how to recover a faulty NTFS volume, and if it places more value on file recovery vs file-system integrity (there is a huge difference between the two). I prefer the later and I am sure that most reading here would prefer to keep the previous good version of the file that experienced a write failure rather than have a the file system keep a newer copy of the file when it is incomplete or corrupt! That depends on how large your "atoms" are in your "atomicity" analogy. I have been burned and shake my head many times because I've seen data lost on NTFS volumes because of the interplay between journalling and write-caching after unexpected system shutdown events. NTFS is more than journalling. There's the organizational structure or pattern as to how you store files and directories, and there's the event or transaction-monitoring and logging operations above that. You could theoretically have journalling performed on a FAT32 file structure. But like I said, NTFS is more convoluted and secretive than it needs to be in the way it stores files on a drive (journalling or no journalling). |
#43
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Virtual Machine and NTFS
John John - MVP wrote:
Other than saying that this behavior was "by design", Microsoft has never said *why* they gave the NT line of OS's the handicap of not being able to create FAT32 volumes larger than 32 gb. Raymond Chen talks about this he Windows Confidential A Brief and Incomplete History of FAT32 ============= For a 32GB FAT32 drive, it takes 4 megabytes of disk I/O to compute the amount of free space. ============ You do realize how trivial a 4 mb data transfer is, today and even 5, 10 years ago - don't you? Chen doesn't mention any other file or drive operation as being impacted by having a large cluster count other than the computation of free space - which I believe is infrequently performed anyways. I formatted a 500 gb drive as a single FAT32 volume using 4kb cluser size just as an excercise to test if Windows 98se could be installed and function on such a volume, and it did - with the exception that it would not create a swap file on such a volume. And as Chen mentions, yes - the *first* directory command on FAT32 volumes with a high cluster-count does take a few minutes (but not successive directory commands). What I found in my testing that either in DOS or under Win-98, that the first dir command (or explorer-view) is instantaneous as long as the number of clusters doesn't exceed 6.3 million. This equates to a FAT size of about 25 mb. I have installed win-98 on FAT32 volumes of various sizes, formatted with a range of cluster sizes from 4kb to 32kb resulting in volumes ranging from 6 to 40 million clusters and have seen no evidence of a performance hit during file manipulations, copying, searching, etc. You on the other hand seem to think that having the FAT as large as possible and then page it to disk is a smart thing to do... Other than the first dir command or first explorer session, I have seen no performance hit under win-9x or even under XP when installed on FAT32 volumes with large FATs. |
#44
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Virtual Machine and NTFS
For NTFS file system is like a woman instead A Big Hard Drive is better for
my file system! and Windows 98 is like a old man instead more then FAT32, will be to Big and all the oil in the world will not make his file system run right! "Philo Pastry" John John - MVP Win The Debate Hands Down so give up! |
#45
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Virtual Machine and NTFS
"Philo Pastry" No you concede the debate
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