Booting on FAT32 reading NTFS

[Nigel Andrews]

I am booting up XP on a FAT32 formatted drive, and trying to copy files from
a slave which is formatted as NTFS.

Reason
The slave drive is possibly faulty and I am trying to recover the contents
before running a disk repair.

Problem
The files are copying much slower to a USB drive, from the NTFS slave, than
from the FAT32 master and I am wondering if this is because of the different
formats.
Is there any way I can speed this up?

I have some 80Gb to copy and it will take days at this rate!

Thanks
Nigel

 

[Ronnie Vernon MVP]

I am booting up XP on a FAT32 formatted drive, and trying to copy files
from a slave which is formatted as NTFS.

Reason
The slave drive is possibly faulty and I am trying to recover the contents
before running a disk repair.

Problem
The files are copying much slower to a USB drive, from the NTFS slave,
than from the FAT32 master and I am wondering if this is because of the
different formats.
Is there any way I can speed this up?

I have some 80Gb to copy and it will take days at this rate!

Thanks
Nigel

The format of the file system is not a consideration when transferring files
from one drive to another. It's likely the speed of the drives that is
causing the difference.

It might be better to use a backup or disk cloning program the move the
files.

 

[Bob Harris]

I have mixed FAT32 and NTFS, both internal and external USB and firewire. I
have never noticed a difference in spedd that I could attribute to the file
system.

However, one of my external drives has a 5400 rpm disk, and that is slower
than the other disk, which run at 7200 rpm.

My internal disks are SATA, and those are a bit faster than my external
disks, whihc are USB 2.0 (or firewire).

I also have an old pen drive that is USB 1.1, and it is a lot slower than
anything else.

Any chance your external drive is USB 1.1, or it is plugged into a USB 1.1
controller? That would certainly slow things down.

You can also improve copying speed by (1) turning off your virus scanner
(but only if you are sure that the files involved have no viruses), (2)
using XCOPY from a command prompt, instead of windows explorer. The format
of XCOPY would be somehting like:

XCOPY D:\*.* C:\TEMP /S /V /H /D /R /EXCLUDE:EXCLUDE.TXT

This copies all of D: to C:\TEMP. Chnage drive letter(s) and directory name
as appropriate. for your system.

Note that the exclude file is a simple text files with at least the
following lines:

\RECYCLED\
\SYSTEM VOLUME INFORMATION\

It needs to be in the directory in whch you run the XCOPY command, that is
where you open the command prompt, or you will need to specify its full path
name.

The reason for excluding these files is that they are normally locked, and
thus XCOPY will fail to copy them. Besides, they usually do not contain
user files. Well, RECYCLED might, but those are files that you deleted, so
I assume you don't want them.

 

[Nigel Andrews]

Ronnie,

Thanks for that and for the quick response.

I don't think there is very much difference in performance between the two
drives, and I believe they are both rated at 7200rpm.

But the difference in copying two files is great
Copying a 300mb file from the master (FAT32) to the USB drive took about 90
seconds
Copying a 100mb file from the slave (NTFS) to the USB drive took nearly 10
mins!

I would try a backup programme but not sure that it will overcome this speed
difference?

Nigel

 

[Nigel Andrews]

Thanks Bob,

For that lengthy description. I appreciate your help.

Nigel

 

[coal_brona]

Hi,

You should take into consideration the fact even if the data is erased
it can be restored using data reocvery tools such as Active@ Undelete
or Uneraser (DOS). They never failed me before and always worked great.
That should definately help you if something happes.

http://www.active-undelete.com/

http://www.uneraser.com/