Archived from groups: microsoft.public.windowsxp.general (
More info?)
On Sun, 14 Aug 2005 23:44:12 +0100, "DL" <dl@spoofmail> wrote:
>Youve been reading incorrect info.
We'll check that later.
>NTFS is the native format of winnt based sys, it is more secure than fat32
>and more efficient
You've just read some typical info on NTFS that is incomplete, if not
actually incorrect.
Yes, NTFS is the native format of NT. That doesn't mean you should
use it, though it may mean you'll be pressured to use it.
Yes, NTFS is more secure than FAT32. But while "secure" is a great
feel-good word, it may not even be relevant to the way you use your
PC. NTFS systems get infected pretty much as easily as FATxx systems,
and if you have the rights to edit your data, any malware running
during your logon will have the right to trash it.
FATxx can be read by and written to by XP, older versions of Windows,
Linux (both HD-based and CD-booted), and DOS modes of Win9x running
from boot diskettes. The file system is well-documented and simple,
and can be maintained from DOS mode Scandisk that will stop and ask
before it "fixes" anything. And there are tools available that let
you (or your tech) hand-repair damaged file system structures.
NTFS can be read and written to by NT such as XP, and only within
compatibility limits that change as NT gets versioned upwards. XP
runs off HD only, unless you go the extra mile to build yourself a
Bart PE CDR that can do the same. There are no interactive repair
tools like Scandisk, no byte-level documentation on what is a far more
complex system, and no tools to manually fix anything.
So you'd better hope NTFS is "more robust", because if it gets barfed,
there are no tools to manually un-barf it and save your data.
Then again, no matter how well-designed a file system may be, it's
still dogmeat to anything that goes wrong below that level of
abstraction - say, bad RAM, failing hard drive, etc.
>"Lee M." <lmacmil@forget_it.com> wrote in message
>> Just got a leftover Seagate 80 gig drive from my son. My boot drive
>> (WinXP SP2) is small is formatted with Fat32. The 80 gig drive is
>> formatted with NTFS. I have read that this file system shouldn't be
>>used on drives smaller than a couple hundred megs.
Well, an 80G HD isn't smaller than a couple of hundred megs. Or did
you mean gigs? I don't see any reason to not use NTFS for HD's in the
2G+ range, if I were considering using it at all. Perhaps it's just
that NTFS's scalability advantages aren't that relevant there.
>> Should I reformat it to Fat32? Any way to do that without booting to
>> a Win98 floppy? Will XP recognize the whole drive as a single volume?
XP will recognise FAT32 volumes right up to 200G+ (the limit is way
higher than that) but it's artificially crippled so that it can't
*format* FAT32 larger than 32G.
Win98's FDisk has problems of its own; the standard one may well not
be able to cope with an 80G hard drive. WinME's FDisk will handle 80G
fine, as will a "fixed" replacement for Win98's FDisk that was
available from MS as a free download. Both of these FDisks have
problems above 99G (they can't input or show those numbers properly)
and no DOS or Win9x is OK over 137G.
Win98's formatter may "look funny", but will format 80G just fine,
once something else has partitioned it a la FDisk.
I don't use any of these tools anymore; I gave up on MS for disk
management and use BING from www.bootitng.com instead. I don't
install it (in other words, I Esc the install-to-HD prompt), I just
use it as a partition manager, a mode it falls through to once you
decline the offer to install it to disk.
>-------------------- ----- ---- --- -- - - - -
Reality is that which, when you stop believing
in it, does not go away (PKD)
>-------------------- ----- ---- --- -- - - - -
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