NTFS & Win98

[Al]

I have 2 HDD's in my comp, Pri has XP home sp2 on a fat32 part, that drive
also has a small NTFS partition for storage. Sec drive is fat32 with Win98
dual booting with Boot It NG.
The 98 install will not read the NTFS part on the Pri drive whitch I gather
in normal.
Now I also have 2 Win98 machines networked to this mach. They both can read
the NTFS partition and transfer files.
Maybe I'm dumb as a stump, but why do the networked 98 machines see the
NTFS part and not the "local" 98?
I hope somebody can explain this to a dumb Arky!

 

[David H. Lipman]

From: "Al" <[email protected]>

| I have 2 HDD's in my comp, Pri has XP home sp2 on a fat32 part, that drive
| also has a small NTFS partition for storage. Sec drive is fat32 with Win98
| dual booting with Boot It NG.
| The 98 install will not read the NTFS part on the Pri drive whitch I gather
| in normal.
| Now I also have 2 Win98 machines networked to this mach. They both can read
| the NTFS partition and transfer files.
| Maybe I'm dumb as a stump, but why do the networked 98 machines see the
| NTFS part and not the "local" 98?
| I hope somebody can explain this to a dumb Arky!
|

DOS and Win9x/ME which is based upon DOS can not read NTFS. However if you are sharing a
data structure on a NTFS partition then WinNT is reading the NTFS and making it available.
In this sense you are not reading it a partition level is being read at a Protocol level, in
this case NetBIOS over IP (most likely).

Similarly if you use Dave on a MAC you can access a NT Share and thus reading a data
structure on a NTFS partition. Again at the protocol level. In another example if you load
Samba on Unix/Linux then a NetBIOS share is created on a Unix partition and WinNT and
Win9x/ME can read the data. Again at the protocol level.

 

[Kenneth Brehaut]

you were correct to assumer win98 cannot read NTFS partitions. The reason
it works over the network connection is because you are going through XP in
order to read the file structure, not doing it directly.

 

[Steve N.]

I have 2 HDD's in my comp, Pri has XP home sp2 on a fat32 part, that drive
also has a small NTFS partition for storage. Sec drive is fat32 with Win98
dual booting with Boot It NG.
The 98 install will not read the NTFS part on the Pri drive whitch I gather
in normal.
Yes.

Now I also have 2 Win98 machines networked to this mach. They both can read
the NTFS partition and transfer files.
Maybe I'm dumb as a stump, but why do the networked 98 machines see the
NTFS part and not the "local" 98?

Networking is handling file shares accross the wire independant of the
file systems in use.

I hope somebody can explain this to a dumb Arky!

Not knowing does not equate to being dumb.

This may be of interest to you:

http://www.sysinternals.com/ntw2k/freeware/ntfswin98.shtml

The freeware version is read-only.

Steve

 

[Ken Blake]

In

I have 2 HDD's in my comp, Pri has XP home sp2 on a fat32 part,
that
drive also has a small NTFS partition for storage. Sec drive is
fat32
with Win98 dual booting with Boot It NG.
The 98 install will not read the NTFS part on the Pri drive
whitch I
gather in normal.

That's correct. Windows 98 can not see an NTFS drive.

Now I also have 2 Win98 machines networked to this mach. They
both
can read the NTFS partition and transfer files.
Maybe I'm dumb as a stump, but why do the networked 98 machines
see
the NTFS part and not the "local" 98?

The networked machines don't really see the NTFS partition. They
get the *data* on the drive, and not its underlying file system,
NTFS or not. It's Windows XP that sees the NTFS partition and
transfers the data it contains over the network to the Windows 98
machines.

It's exactly the same on the internet (a big network). Every time
you download a file from a server somewhere, you have no idea
what kind of computer the server is, what operating system it's
running, what file system it uses, etc. And it doesn't matter.
Even if all of that is completely incompatible with what you run,
there's no problem; what you get is the data that's transmitted
down the line to you.