A Question About NTFS

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Cucumber

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Ok i just installed Win2000 Pro, and i've heard things about this NTFS file structure, but i would like to know more information before i change from FAT32:

-Will all information be lost?
-What are the advantages of it?
-Is it faster? If so is it worth changing?
-How Do i Do it?:rolleyes:

Thanks lads

Cucumber
 
-Not unless something very unlikely and very strange happens. Otherwise the FAT32 is converted to NTFS.

-Various advantages:

Smaller cluster sizes, therefore less disk space is wasted.
More advanced structure - supposedly more robust.
More advanced features - you can set permissions on who can access certain files and folders and what access they get, you can compress volumes to save space, you can also encrypt files and folder and volumes as well. It also supports VERY large volume sizes.... Much bigger than the max of 2 TB with FAT32. But since you don't have any HDD device that supports anything like this kind of size this point is a little moot.

There are many other advantages, but you get the general idea.

-Opinion is divided on whether its faster.

-You convert a volume from FAT or FAT32 to NTFS like this

open command prompt:

convert c: /FS:NTFS

where c: is the drive you want to convert. It will convert any drive that's not the drive that windows is installed on right there and then, otherwise it will convert the system drive the next time you reboot.

NTFS drives are not accessible from Windows 95, 98 or ME unless you use third party tools, most of which are read only. You can compile a linux kernel for read only support and even write access too, but its highly experimental and unreliable. Really, NTFS is intended for Windows NT like OS from Microsoft to access like NT4, Windows 2000 and XP and not really to work with anything else. As you can imagine, you will not be able to access an NTFS volume when you boot from a normal DOS boot disk.

Do you want to convert to NTFS? is the question you should be asking yourself.

-Do you want to set security permissions on files?

-Do you want to do stuff like join several partitions on several disks onto one big drive and stuff? (i.e. like join the space on several HDDs into one d: drive, etc....)

-Do you want to use the compression?

-Do you want to be able toe encrypt files?

-Is the volume you want to convert only used by Windows 2000/NT4/XP, etc???

You have to think carefully about this first.

If you are creating something like a Windows 2000 server, then I suggest that it would be silly NOT to use NTFS. In fact, in order to create a domain controller in Windows 2000 I believe you MUST be using NTFS.

If you don't want any of the features that I mentioned then I guess you may as well stay with FAT32 for now.
 
NTFS is also faster on "Large" partitions. Dunno what they consider large though. Maybe bigger than 20 MB?! I know I prefer it.
 
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