Fat32 to NTFS conversion and network compatibility

[George]

I upgraded to XP Home. Considering conversion to NTFS. On
my home network, the rest of the computers are Windows
98se. If I upgrade my box to NTFS, will the older Win 98
computers on my network be able to access files on my
computer?

 

[HillBillyBuddhist]

| I upgraded to XP Home. Considering conversion to NTFS. On
| my home network, the rest of the computers are Windows
| 98se. If I upgrade my box to NTFS, will the older Win 98
| computers on my network be able to access files on my
| computer?
|

Yes. No problem.

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I was just trying to help.
Please use your own best judgment before implementing any suggestions or
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No warranty is expressed or implied.
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[Bruce Chambers]

Greetings --

The file systems on the various computers communicating over a
network are completely irrelevant, as none of the individual
computers' operating systems ever directly access the other computers'
hard drives. Instead, a computer sends a "request," if you will, for
the desired data, and the operating system of the host ("receiving")
computer accesses its own hard drive (whose file system it obviously
can read) and then sends that data back to the requesting computer as
neutral packets of information that are completely independent of the
file systems on the respective computers. After all, don't you use a
Windows-based PC (whether it's FAT32 or NTFS) to access data stored on
the Internet's mostly Unix servers, which use a completely different
file system?

Personally, I wouldn't even consider using FAT32 when NTFS is an
option. FAT32 has no security capabilities, no compression
capabilities, no fault tolerance, and a lot of wasted hard drive space
on volumes larger than 8 Gb in size. But your computing needs may
vary, and there is no hard and fast answer.

To answer your questions without getting too technical is
difficult, but has been handled quite well by Alex Nichol in the
article here:

FAT & NTFS File Systems in Windows XP
http://www.aumha.org/a/ntfs.htm

Somewhat more technical information is here:

Limitations of the FAT32 File System in Windows XP
http://support.microsoft.com/directory/article.asp?ID=kb;en-us;Q314463

Choosing Between File Systems
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/tr...prodtechnol/winntas/tips/techrep/filesyst.asp

You can safely convert your hard drive to NTFS whenever desired,
without having to format the partition and reinstall everything. As
always when performing any serious changes, back up any important data
before proceeding, just in case. A little advance preparation is also
strongly recommended, so you can avoid any performance hits caused by
the default cluster size:

Converting FAT32 to NTFS in Windows
http://www.aumha.org/a/ntfscvt.htm



Bruce Chambers

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[George]

Thanks to all
George

 

[Ken Blake]

In

I upgraded to XP Home. Considering conversion to NTFS. On
my home network, the rest of the computers are Windows
98se. If I upgrade my box to NTFS, will the older Win 98
computers on my network be able to access files on my
computer?

Yes. File systems are irrelevant across a network. It's just the
data that's sent over the network, not the file structure they
are store on.

It's like downloading a file on the internet. You have no idea
what file system the file you are downloading is stored on, and
you don't care.