Korean Job Discussion Forums

[Thunndarr]

Is it easy to change the file system of WindowsXP from FAT32 to NTFS on a single hard drive? What software would I need for this and how hard is it to do?

[snufalufagus]

It's very easy and you can do it with Partition Magic or better yet is that Windows XP has a tool to do it

Open a Command Prompt by clicking Start, point to All Programs, point to Accessories, and then click Command Prompt.

In the command prompt window, type

convert drive_letter: /fs:NTFS

For example, typing convert C /fs:ntfs would format drive C with the NTFS format.

Then just let it run and do not interrupt the process and make sure you machine is plugged into AC power (if it's a laptop of course)

[Thunndarr]

And this doesn't affect any of the data on the disk, right?

[snufalufagus]

The is minimal risk ... there is, of course, risk of damage, no matter what you do, but it converts your drive and you don't lose data, it simply "converts" it and does not delete or lose material.

You should run a diskchk first to make sure the are no errors, though it does all that for you.

It'll convert and then you're finished and your system will continue to work ... it's not like formatting a drive

[Thunndarr]

Thanks...I've been meaning to do this for a while, just never got around to doing it.

[Dalton]

This ia a poor explanation and perhaps someone more knowledgable will take up the cause but changing to NTFS from FAT32 is simply a matter of changing the length of files that are allowed on the HDD.

FAT32 allows 32 kb chunks while NTFS doesn't care how big the chunks are. Thats why your files won't likely be affected. Some progs however have FAT32 written into them and they will screw up since it doesn't exist. Others may run faster. Most will be inert to the change.

Chances are that nothing you have will be messed up since NTFS was adopted as a standard about 10 years before MS enterd the 20th C.

I know I am not perfectly correct but the difference needs to be explained IMHO.

[Demophobe]

FAT and NTFS use very different on-disk structures to represent the allocation of space for files. These structures are often referred to as meta-data or file system overhead.

The FAT file system's meta-data consists of a boot sector, one or more File Allocation Tables, a fixed-size root directory structure, and a variable amount of space for each sub-directory related to the number of files in the sub-directory.

Another kind of overhead associated with both FAT and NTFS is related to the fact that both file systems allocate disk space in clusters of a fixed size. The exact size of these allocation units or clusters is determined at format time, and the defaults are dependent on the size of the volume. The default cluster size for NTFS is smaller than the default for FAT on similarly sized volumes.

Because space for file data can only be allocated in whole cluster amounts, even a one byte file will end up using a cluster's worth of disk space on a FAT volume. The NTFS case is similar, but slightly more complicated.

Like FAT, NTFS has a certain amount of fixed size overhead and a certain amount of per-file overhead. In order to support the advanced features of NTFS, such as recoverability, security, support for very large volumes, and so forth, the NTFS meta-data overhead is somewhat larger than the FAT meta- data overhead. On the other hand, because NTFS cluster overhead is smaller than FAT cluster overhead, it is often possible to store as much, if not more data on an NTFS volume as on a FAT volume, even without using NTFS file compression.

In order to guard against the possibility of corruption caused by failure during conversion, Convert.exe must build the NTFS meta-data using only that space which is considered free space by the FAT file system. In this way, if the conversion fails to complete, the FAT representation of the user files is still valid. Complicating this strategy is that one sector of NTFS data must occupy a specific location on the disk, and a very limited number of other structures must occupy contiguous sectors.

A nice table can be found at

http://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/Windows/XP/all/reskit/en-us/Default.asp?url=/resources/documentation/Windows/XP/all/reskit/en-us/prkc_fil_lxty.asp

Microsoft's support pages are very cool.

[Dalton]

Thanks Demophobe.

I don't how much that helps but I've seen other posters ask about switching from FAT32 to NTFS. It seems logical that a description of the difference and the impact of the change over exists in this forum.

[snufalufagus]

Quite correct Lemon, the way it was worded made it appear to be in a different person that was suggested

My fault

- message edited -

[Giant]

Why do you need to change? Are you upgrading your hard drive to something larger than 32GB? You only NEED to go to NTFS if you are working with video editing and have huge files, or have a drive larger than 32GB.

If I were you, a safer way would be to just back up all your data, and re-format with NTFS from scratch. It's "cleaner" doing it that way.

[The Lemon]

[Thunndarr]

Well, my hard drive is 120 gigabytes right now, and I do occasionally work with files over 4 gigs...And I've heard that NTFS is easier to recover data from in the event of a snafu.

...so, I guess that would be why.

[Dalton]

Thanks Lemon.

I knew my explanation was liable for abuse but I know some people are still using MS 95. The NTFS vs Fat32 or 95/98 vs XP is going to come up on a forum like this.

As I said I wanted to prompt the experts to put up a definitive explanation. No harm done.

I don't want to be pushy here but the more simplistic the answer the better. Pretending you're a teacher talking to a student is better form than pretending to be a prof talking to an undergrad who should know better.

[Giant]

[wylde]