FAT32 or NTFS......questions!!

[ironguy]

MFT and convert

I have seen an article and a way to create the MFT where you want it when running convert. I wish I could remember where, maybe on MS. If you do this and align your clusters prior to convert, there is virtually no difference between a converted disc and clean install. Ah, I found it. You can use the /cvtarea:filename command line entry in convert to stipulate the MFT. The contiguous file space must already exist. See the link for the whole scoop.


MS TechNet NTFS Articles

 

[Geffy]

OK I have to point out a serious piece of misinformation that people keep saying over and over again.


Win9x/ME cannot natively (ie out of the box) read from a local NTFS partition, but with the addition of a single piece of software it is completely possible.
With this piece of software you cannot write to the drive, but most people have used the word accessible which refers to the ability to see and read the drive and not write to it, that side of things is taken care of with the FAT32 support in WinXP

NTFS for Windows 9x

You can also get (for a price) NTFS for DOS which can Read/Write

 

[cat826237]

Mistake changing to NTFS

I changed from FAT32 to NTFS and don't like it.Everything has slowed down and with diskeeper defrag I have frags everywhere. Ran the defrag and now a half day later-same thing, fragmented files everywhere again. Have Dell 1.8 with a 40 Gig drive and 256 rd ram. Also takes almost an hour to complete the defrag program!

 

[ironguy]

How big are your clusters?

If you convert to NTFS from FAT32 without aligning the clusters, you will end up with a default 4k cluster size rather than the optimum 512k cluster size (40gb drive).

That means that everytime a file size increases past 4k, it allocates another cluster, although not necessarily congruent to the old one. I suspect that is what has happened. You will probably end up with about 100 times more files thatn you really need!

BTW, a one hour defrag on a 40G drive is pretty good.

 

[Nemesis]

All,

It is not possible to format a floppy disk with the NTFS file system; Windows NT formats all floppy disks with the FAT file system because the overhead involved in NTFS will not fit onto a floppy disk.

You can format a Floppy disk with NTFS, however its not really recommended:

NTFS Support for Floppy Disks Copyright 1997 Mark Russinovich.

And yes I know, its not worth it!