XPerties Posted September 24, 2003 Posted September 24, 2003 Anyone know if I can convert partitions from NTFS to fat32? And If I can will I lose any information on the drives that are on there now?
Skyfrog Posted September 24, 2003 Posted September 24, 2003 Partition Magic can convert NTFS to FAT32, supposedly without losing any data. I would still suggest backing up anything important first, just in case.
XPerties Posted September 25, 2003 Author Posted September 25, 2003 Partition Magic can convert NTFS to FAT32, supposedly without losing any data. I would still suggest backing up anything important first, just in case.It's over 80 gigs on 3 partitions worth of stuff. Backing up is not an option as I do not have enough CDRWS or other drive space.I guess I'll try it.
KonuS Posted September 25, 2003 Posted September 25, 2003 Remember that WinXP can make 32GB partition with fat32 filesytem, i thing if you use PM everything will be ok.
ThA_FiLeR Posted September 25, 2003 Posted September 25, 2003 theres a command in xp that does this, look up on google, its on the official M$ site somewhere..
Skyfrog Posted September 25, 2003 Posted September 25, 2003 theres a command in xp that does thisIf you mean the convert command, it won't work. That is only for converting FAT32 to NTFS; unfortunately it won't work the other way around.It's over 80 gigs on 3 partitions worth of stuff.Do you have enough room to move it all to one or two of the partitions, and then do a clean reformat of the third? If you juggle the stuff around like that you might be able to reformat them all. You might want to consider getting some type of high capacity backup device, maybe a tape drive or DVD-R/RAM. If the hard disk were to fail, and they can do it with no warning, all that data would be lost.
sTe Posted September 25, 2003 Posted September 25, 2003 theres a command in xp that does this, look up on google, its on the official M$ site somewhere..I think you are thinking of convert ... which comes with 2000 and XP ... and only converts from FAT to NTFS.From command prompt type "convert /?" for options.Sorry if there is a program on the site... that does it the other way.sTe
darph Posted September 25, 2003 Posted September 25, 2003 with pm you can make it without problems but why you will change back to fat32 ?? ntfs is quite a better filesystem and have more security like fat32 and the capacety of the harddrive is better used with ntfs.
sTe Posted September 25, 2003 Posted September 25, 2003 The only advantage I can see (which probably isnt noticable) is the OS has less security / permissions to check, I heard it boots faster too ... dunno if thats a myth or not. One other thing which its good for, is you can boot from a boot disk and install windows from that partition, whereas if you boot from a boot disk and then try run setup, whilst your drives are all NTFS you will get in trouble trying to install windows when it trys and copies the basic files to get the installer / drives detected... something that caused me problems when trying to boot from a boot disk and connecting to network share drive and installing windows that way, just kept falling over because of the NTFS / FAT issue.
XPerties Posted September 25, 2003 Author Posted September 25, 2003 with pm you can make it without problems but why you will change back to fat32 ?? ntfs is quite a better filesystem and have more security like fat32 and the capacety of the harddrive is better used with ntfs.Actually this PC is used for backups for all my servers located in other parts of the world. Also my wife , kids, and I use it to backups from the other 3 PC within the house. I had winodws server which just sucks so I installed Linux Redhat 9. The issue is I can not mount the partitions or get linux to read NTFS so I need to convert it back to fat format.I guess I'll cont. this thread in the linux section to see if there to see if there is a app that allows linux to read ntfs partitions...http://board.MSFN.org/index.php?act=ST&f=61&t=9048
Skyfrog Posted September 25, 2003 Posted September 25, 2003 I have never used Red Hat Linux but I have Mandrake 9.0 and it can read NTFS partitions just fine. Seems like Red Hat should be able to also, but it may not auto-mount them the way Mandrake does. You may have to figure out how to do that.As far as I know Linux cannot write to NTFS partitions, they are read only.
jayroller Posted September 25, 2003 Posted September 25, 2003 Seems like Red Hat should be able to also, but it may not auto-mount them the way Mandrake does.Apparently, Red Hat removed the ability to read NTFS from Shrike due to "Licencing Issues" - but there's an RPM available (or you can rebuild the kernel) to add the feature.
scankurban Posted September 25, 2003 Posted September 25, 2003 PM works Dos and win32 verison PM.But you can't convert xp boot partiton ntfs-to fat32.1-PM can't convert already installed NT OS disk or partition.Because NT systems automatically using disk compression system for some critical files.2-If you can do this(My opinion nobody can do).I'm sure all NT version systems will doesn't work after conversion.3-Other partitions and disk if don't use compression,you can convert even ext2 4-Disk compression;Right clik any directory on the NTFS system,properties->Advanced.See it for your self what is this.
darph Posted September 26, 2003 Posted September 26, 2003 if it boot faster i don´t know i never have stop the time but ntfs is not compatible with dos so you can´t boot your pc with dos anymore thats the only disadvantage of ntfs i think so longdarph
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