painless file system conversion ?

[vinifera]

so I have 32gig USB stick but by default it came with FAT32 FS

now that I stiffed bunch of movies on it I wish to have it in NTFS, but don't want to format or lose data

 

can conversion be made "direct" without killing data on it ?

[bphlpt]

Yes:

 

http://www.tweakandtrick.com/2012/02/convert-fat32-to-ntfs-file-system.html

http://www.howtogeek.com/58953/how-to-convert-a-hard-drive-or-flash-drive-from-fat32-to-ntfs-format/

http://lifehacker.com/5792251/how-to-convert-a-hard-drive-from-fat32-to-ntfs

 

Cheers and Regards

[jaclaz]

A word of caution.

 

The fact that it can be done (and that it is a rare case that something goes wrong with the procedure) does not really-really mean that it should be done or that it is in any way smart to do that.

 

The process - more or less - consists in:

1. take the contents of a small area of the device and move it somewhere else on the same device to make some space for the NTFS filesystem structures
2. create the filesystem structures
3. move the contents of a small area of the device to somewhere else
4. index these contents
5. loop to #3 n times until finished

More or less it is a sort of defrag on steroids and consider how AFAIK everyone in the world that ever made the conversion from FAT16 or from FAT32 to NTFS did it successfully on a largely empty volume, and not on a filled up to the brim one.

 

Now what could go wrong on a complex defrag on a USB stick?:

1. a blackout
2. overheating of the stick
3. unless it is a fastish USB 3 device it will take a loooong time
4. excessive wear of the device and/or some conflicts with the internal wear leveling algorithms
5. something else

I would advise to not take this route, unless you have (as you should have in my perverted mind) a verified backup of the data, but then if you have it, you can directly re-format the stick and restore the data. 

 

jaclaz

[vinifera]

yeah my HDD is small ... im still old HW user

kinda sucks to see USB stick to have bigger storage than my partition

 

then again I belong to those "if it aint broken don't fix it"