NTFS/Fat32

[george]

Formatted my hard drive and reinstalled XP. System was
fat 32 before. Now when I go into defrag it sys file
sytem is NTFS. Is this better than fat 32? Is it possible
to change back to fat 32 without formating. Pros and cons
please.

 

[David Candy]

NTFS is faster in general use on all but small hard drives. Many features of XP are only available if the file system is NTFS. There are no additional features in Fat32.

Fat32 is used mainly if dual booting with another operating system. Win 98 can read Fat32 disks but not NTFS.

There is no inbuilt way to convert from NTFS to Fat32.

 

[Ray Taylor]

NTFS is the recomended format mainly because of security features (right
click a file and select properties > |security|) and also I have heard of
faster drive access.

Unfourtunatly you cannot change back to FAT32 without using a program such
as ghost or hardware to backup, format and then restore. Or you could just
format the drive and loose your data.


Ray Taylor
(e-mail address removed)

 

[Michael Solomon \(MS-MVP-Windows Shell/User\)]

I concur with both David and Ray in this thread. However, there are third
party utilities such as the more recent versions of Partition Magic that can
convert from NTFS to Fat32 without formatting the hard drive. I'm not
recommending doing this as it is highly volatile and unless you are well
backed up for the possibility that something might go wrong, I wouldn't
attempt it. Natively, this is not supported in Windows XP and as both David
and Ray pointed out, there are numerous security features that are turned on
with NTFS that you don't have with Fat32.

 

[JCH]

Why do you say that?

Forget fat 32 with xp pro.

 

[Nicholas]

Windows XP runs best on a single partition formatted NTFS.

NTFS Preinstallation and Windows XP
http://www.microsoft.com/hwdev/tech/storage/ntfs-preinstall.asp

Benchmarking on Windows XP
http://www.microsoft.com/hwdev/platform/performance/benchmark.asp


--
Nicholas

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| Why do you say that?
|
| | > Forget fat 32 with xp pro.
| >
| >
| >
| > | > > Formatted my hard drive and reinstalled XP. System was
| > > fat 32 before. Now when I go into defrag it sys file
| > > sytem is NTFS. Is this better than fat 32? Is it possible
| > > to change back to fat 32 without formating. Pros and cons
| > > please.
| >
| >
|
|
|