NTFS boot disk how to make one??

[Paul M]

I was thinking of changing atleast my boot partition to NTFS. But no
way in POO POO will i do it unless i have boot disk that allow me to
get to the dospromt and load my cd rom driveres ect ect like my dos
boot disk.

Any help.


PS/ Do i realy need to convert all my partions to NTFS to get the full
benifit. or will my boot drive be enough. Also should i have my
swapfile on a NTFS partiton to be a benfit in speed ect?

Thanks.

 

[philo]

I was thinking of changing atleast my boot partition to NTFS. But no
way in POO POO will i do it unless i have boot disk that allow me to
get to the dospromt and load my cd rom driveres ect ect like my dos
boot disk.

Any help.


PS/ Do i realy need to convert all my partions to NTFS to get the full
benifit. or will my boot drive be enough. Also should i have my
swapfile on a NTFS partiton to be a benfit in speed ect?

Thanks.

from the command prompt

convert X: /FS:NTFS (where X is the drive you wish to convert)

 

[André Gulliksen]

I was thinking of changing atleast my boot partition to NTFS. But no
way in POO POO will i do it unless i have boot disk that allow me to
get to the dospromt and load my cd rom driveres ect ect like my dos
boot disk.

If you are really anal about having to do it from MS-DOS, look at
http://www.sysinternals.com/ntw2k/freeware/ntfsdos.shtml and download the
little NTFS driver presented to you. Throw it onto your favourite 3.5" and
you should be set. It should probably fit without problems, I believe my
copy is about 27 kB after packing it with UPX.

That being said, using MS-DOS and 3.5" floppies to access NTFS partitions is
an extremely backwards way to go. You should definitely look into some live
CDs powered by more modern operating systems. Knoppix (Linux-based,
http://www.knopper.net/knoppix/index-en.html) and BartPE (XP-based,
http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/) are good places to start. Also, you should
know about what you can (and can't) do with the recovery console on your XP
installation CD.

Generally, the day of the boot floppies are counted. As a matter of fact,
the day of floppies in general should be counted (Apple did the right thing
years ago, and the major obstacle for Windows users these days seems to be
installing XP on SATA systems). Most computers these days can boot a CD
without problems, and even really old ones (10 years +) can usually be
convinced to boot a CD using the right boot manager.

PS/ Do i realy need to convert all my partions to NTFS to get the full
benifit. or will my boot drive be enough.

OK, so I have got some cans of this great new paint which is supposed to
protect my house from the weather better than earlier versions. Should I
apply a layer to all my walls, or just the sunside one?

Converting your boot drive to NTFS means your boot partition benefits from
NTFS, the others don't. Converting them all would be the logical thing to
do, unless you have specific reasons not to. Personally I have 6 partitions:
4xNTFS, 1xUFS (OK, really one slice with multiple labels) and 1xFAT32. The
last one is to easily interchange data between Windows XP and FreeBSD, apart
from that it is not used.

Also should i have my
swapfile on a NTFS partiton to be a benfit in speed ect?

Probably, but I have no hard numbers to back that claim up. For one thing,
my guess is that NTFS is at least a good way to reduce possible
fragmentation of the pagefile.

 

[Tom]

That being said, using MS-DOS and 3.5" floppies to access NTFS partitions
is an extremely backwards way to go. You should definitely look into some
live CDs powered by more modern operating systems. Knoppix (Linux-based,
http://www.knopper.net/knoppix/index-en.html) and BartPE (XP-based,
http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/) are good places to start. Also, you should
know about what you can (and can't) do with the recovery console on your
XP installation CD.

Knoppix is the way to go really. You can do just what you say, it doesn't
load from the internal drive, it can use the internet, email, and all the
other things as well a Windows, except for maybe the soundcards. And, you
can screw around with the boot partition(s).

 

[Bob Harris]

I agree with others that something like KNOPPIX beats a floppy boot disk
with NTFS drivers.

By the way, the free DOS drivers are read/copy only and can not be used to
fix things on the har drive. They can salvage data from an unbootable NTFS
disk, but only if you also have some place to which you can write the files,
and which DOS recognizes. That does not leave many options, unless you have
a scond internal hard drive, maybe an internal ZIP. Remmeber that DOS does
not support USB or firewire, although there are some DOS drivers for those
things that sometimes can be made to work on some PCs.

Personally, I prefer Bart's PE builder, which gives you native read AND
WRITE support for NTFS. Bart's is made from XP, so it is 100% compatible
with NTFS, and handles USB and firewire as well. Link to Bart's:

http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/index.php?p=1

However, the first time you make a Bart's CD, you will have work a bit to
understand all the instructions. It is worth learning. Fortunately, Bart's
checks everything before attempting to make an ISO file, which you then burn
to CD (burn with an option like make CD from imge; do not just copy it to a
CD).

But, the bigger question is WHY do you want to convert to NTFS? Sure NTFS
has better securtity, especially with XP Pro, and in a multi-user
environment that may be worth something But, unless you get into data
encryption, there are many free rescue CDs that will copy files off a disk
with NTFS, independent of ownership permissions, so "security" is almost
non-existant, if anyone gets physical access to your PC. As for speed, I
have not heard that NTFS is any faster than FAT32. In fact, since it is
more complex, I would guess that the opposite is true. In theory NTFS is
more "fault tolerant" than FAT32, but it is still far from perfect. The one
reason that I have some NTFS partitions is that NTFS has no (practical)
limit on the size of a single file, and my video recorder often leads to
temporary single files larger than 4 Gig, which is the limit for FAT32.

If you are looking for speed, invest in more RAM. No pagefile.sys, even on
SCSI RAID, can compare to RAM for speed.

 

[André Gulliksen]

Sure
NTFS has better securtity, especially with XP Pro, and in a multi-user
environment that may be worth something

Also, you can use non-administrator accounts for day-to-day tasks without
risking ruining the entire system by accident or because of some sort of
malware.

Apart from that, NTFS advantages over FAT32 has been debated quite a lot on
these groups just recently, I believe.

 

[Enkidu]

I was thinking of changing atleast my boot partition to NTFS. But no
way in POO POO will i do it unless i have boot disk that allow me to
get to the dospromt and load my cd rom driveres ect ect like my dos
boot disk.

There is no such thing as an XP boot disk, if you mean a
disk that will boot XP directly to a DOS prompt. You can use
the CD to boot to the Recovery Console and perform some
recovery operations from there.

But I suspect that this is a troll. I've not had to load a
CD-ROM driver for years. They all use the ATAPI interface
these days.

Cheers,

Cliff

 

[Paul M]

Iam no trol man. I am just not as bright as you. I have my boot disc
and iam not going to change

 

[Enkidu]

OK fair enough. My apologies. But you will have to give up
your boot disc, sorry!

Cheers,

Cliff