change from fat 32 to ntfs

how do you do it in xp home

 

welcome scott, There are a couple way to do this and they are both listed here.

Do be certain that this is something you should do since it's not easily reversible without either losing data or paying money for a 3rd party utility.

Basically, if your drive is 32 Gigs or less you should strongly consider keeping the FAT32 format.

Cheers.

 

I'm sorry Christer, I should have been more specific. It pertains to the logical drive size (partition) when determining whether or not to opt for NTFS over FAT32.

Thanks for asking.

 

How that works is, if the partition you select to install XP on is =< 32Gigs, you will see the option on the menu offering the FAT32 format along with NTFS. If your chosen partition is >32Gigs, you will not have that choice available.

If you don't make any change to what is presented, it will always have NTFS pre-selected for any size partition. You may consider that as a default setting.

If you want to install XP on a partition >32Gigs and use the FAT32 format, you must pre-format the drive using the conventional DOS Format command rather than using the XP install software to do it. You can also change from NTFS later by using 3rd party software such as Partition Magic, which worked well for me. My box came with NTFS formatting on a 36Gig partition and I changed to FAT32 and like it much better. To each his own, I found mine.

 

NTFS vs. FAT32

No question that NTFS has more security options available. FAT32 just plain doesn't know how to do many of them. But - for most home users, they are overkill and you'd never need them.

NTFS should be a little better at protecting data as well. So, if you are partitioned and have system stuff on one and data on another, you might want to make your system drive FAT32 (more utilities that will allow you to work on it) and your data partition NTFS.

NTFS will tolerate fragmentation and some kinds of errors much better than FAT32 and will keep on keeping on when FAT32 would get flakey and probably crash. But - that is only a seriously good feature for production servers where you don't have the luxury of cleaning up and rebooting when you want to.

For servers in a large domain environment, NTFS for sure.

For PCs in the same environment, NTFS probably (and most places your sysadmin won't offer you a choice).

For home/small office workgroup environment, either one could be your choice depending on what you want to do and which "feels" better to you. I run only NTFS but that is just because I'm so much more comfortable with the available options and the way they present. I haven't used FAT on an NT machine in so long I really don't hardly remember how it behaves.

 

Do it all in FAT32; you can easily convert it later if you so decide. M$ supplies the tool. You cannot easily convert the other direction without some outside help. I just never did like being painted into a corner that way. I paid for the 3rd party program to get away from NTFS. All that Phoney Baloney Recovery Console seems like borderline Voodoo. I like to be able to see ALL the files from a good old fashioned DOS boot disk. When I see some great advantage to changing back, I'll rethink it but so far I'm as happy as a FAT32 clam.

 

Christer - going from ME to an operating system should be a joy for you. XP is just naturally more stable than ME. Of course, so are 98FE/SE and just about any other OS you can think of unless you got really lucky with ME.

Re: Zephyr's idea of setting up FAT32 and converting if you want - certainly easier to convert that way than from NTFS to FAT32 since that will require a 3rd party app. OTOH, a usual side-effect of the FAT32 > NTFS conversion using the built-in "convert" tool is you wind up with 512byte clusters. They work fine but the drive will frag up in a hurry. I did and mine does and I'm just too dang cheap to get an app like Partition Magic that will resize the clusters back to 4K. I just defrag once a week.

But for a home PC, XP with FAT32 should be solid and stable for you.

 

Thanks for that link. Some new information to me. I wasn't aware that the XP convert.exe was smarter than the 2K one.

But their version numbering has me completely befuddled.

NT3.51 ran NTFS version 1.0 (also called 3.0). NT4 uses version 1.1 which is also called version 4 since it appeared with NT4.

But I've only heard the 2000 version called NTFS 5.0 and the XP version 5.1. And yet the technet article used 3.0 and 3.1 rather than 5.0 and 5.1.