Dos with native NTFS support ?

snowdog

snowdog

snowdog

Soldato
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Does anyone know from what ms dos version, NTFS was supported ?
Need to recover a dead drive ( wich works with a (slow) ntfs reader app in an old dos that doesnt support ntfs), the process would be much better if the dos supported ntfs natively.

Prefer not to use free/ open source dos as expeirenced they have some issues sometimes comapred to ms dos.
 
I'm not aware of any official MS DOS versions with native NTFS support. If it was me I'd use a Bart PE disc or one of it's derivatives (e.g. Ultimate Boot CD 4 Win) or you could even use a Knoppix CD.
 
MS-DOS has never supported NTFS, AFAIK.

Linux has been capable of reading NTFS perfectly for years. I've copied gigabytes of files from NTFS partitions, under Linux, without incident. ( You can verify with md5sum, if in doubt ). Write support is more recent, but I hear it is decent these days.
 
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WinPE or BartPE boot Disk is the way for these sort of things. Or if you can find it Hyrens Ultimate Boot CD (cannot post link)
 
Hmmm k, hence I hate ntfs lol, if it messes up you cant recover your drive nice and easely.
With fat32 you just fire up dos, fire up norton commander, and you copy everything onto another hdd even if the hdd is dieing. Even hdd's with the click of death work fine in dos often. It's just Sloooooow, but hey, it works.

Dos is a lot less agressive on hdd's than winxp, never mind vista wich abuses hdd's completly.
 
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I would agree about Windows becoming more aggressive as times have come forward but what can you expect! The more we want from our rigs something like the hard drive will be raped in a mater of no time, but think this way the technology that makes hard drives work is 30years old (if not a bit more) yeah some refinements have been made to speed them up and increase size, but the basic ideas and principals have been the same since day one.

With the boot CD's thou you dont need norton comander as you have a basic windows/linux based operating system. i have saved many installs with BartPE and Ubuntu boot disks and they usualy take the same time to load as a floppy disk! my bartpe disk boots in under 20s (custom built to my needs)
 
There are other journaled filesystems like EXT3 however you can't use them with windows (atleast you can't install to, you can mount them with 3rd party software).

NTFS actually isn't that bad, 10x better than FAT32. Linux Live CDs mostly have NTFS writing in the form of the NTFS-3G Kernel module.
 
Ethics said:
NTFS actually isn't that bad, 10x better than FAT32.
Click to expand...
It's a whole lot better than that...

NTFS is one of the most reliable, most mature and performant file systems that exists today. It was built specifically for servers. So whatever a desktop workstation can throw at it is nothing!
 
Yes but compatibility...

Why would a filesystem crash anyways though, my c:\ and e:\ drives are still fat32 ( and have been for years) and I never have any problem ?
Hardware failures are more realistic imo and worse (especially with some of my hdd's reaching 5 years and having been on half their life, and having over 2500 bootups).
Sure ntfs is nice when everything works ( It's quite essential actually to have at least 1 ntfs partiton, not a worry to me anyways coz 1300 of my 1550 total gigagytes on my pc are ntfs anyways), but when your hdd gives you a click of death or hangs anywhere during starting windows, you need DOS to recover your files, or at least something that aint that agressive as windows.

Basicly I have a failed hitachi 160 gb drive with some stuff I'd like to get back, not essential but still nice to have.
Problem though that with a dos ntfs reader, it took me an hour to get 3 files totalling 700 kb back.
If it was a fat32 it'd copy the stuff much faster and open stuff much faster.
 
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DOS isn't needed to recover files. It all depends how bad the disk failure is. Often you will do best putting it into another machine as a slave drive and going from there.

There is plenty of recovery software that boot their own OS and run from there too.
 
FAT has a partition size limitation and a filesize limitation, if you image a lot of software, games and movies for backup it isn't really an option, plus NTFS compresses to save space.

As stated above, DOS isn't needed, plenty of better alternatives, you could even have a tiny drive with another install on, switch it to master, boot to it and mount the failing drive if you had to.
 
NathanE said:
DOS isn't needed to recover files. It all depends how bad the disk failure is. Often you will do best putting it into another machine as a slave drive and going from there.

There is plenty of recovery software that boot their own OS and run from there too.
Click to expand...

It is a slave drive and has always been, it hangs on the blue chkdsk screen in XP on ''skipping autocheck'' with a hearable Click of Death regardless on what pc it's connected to, on pc's with no blue screen ( pc without raid, or at least mine started showing it from the mo I had raid) it just hangs on the end of the kernel loading screen ( again click of death).
And when tryign to boot vista from it ( winxp is on a workign wd drive, vista is on the dead hitachi) it always gets to the end but near the end of the kernel loader screen Click of death and freeze.

So erm, linux is less agressive on hdd's than windies ?

Didnt try hotplugging the drive yet when windows alrdy booted up, perhaps that's an option ?
 
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