FAT32 to NTFS – in Windows?

slipd · 14 Dec 2008 at 12:26

Hey guys,

I’ve got a, fully fit installation of XP on an old machine, but it’s been formatted to fat32… I seem to recall a colleague a while a go saying that there is software out there to perform a full conversion to ntfs?

Any thoughts

Cheers,

SW.

Pilky01 · 14 Dec 2008 at 12:29

You can do it with cmd, I can't remember the command though

rpstewart · 14 Dec 2008 at 12:29

convert.exe comes with Windows and is designed to do just this.

Fire up a command window and run convert /? to get the full syntax.

Memphis · 14 Dec 2008 at 12:58

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/307881

First Google result

slipd · 14 Dec 2008 at 13:01

Fantastic! And there's no risk involved?

lord filbuster · 14 Dec 2008 at 13:31

Probably a little bit risky, backup anything important.

SourChipmunk · 14 Dec 2008 at 14:25

Funny that you should bring this up. I was just working on a rebuild for my neighbour's PC and was backing up all his files to an external drive. While trying to copy a couple large movie files (7GB), I was getting the error "Insufficient disk space", although there was over 250GB available. My memory stretched waaay back and I realised it was probably because it was formatted with a FAT32 file system. Checked in Disk Management and sure enough.

I didn't even think about converting the drive. Since it was only two files I made him burn them to a DVD instead. Thanks for bringing this topic up for future reference.

Burnsy2023 · 14 Dec 2008 at 14:27

lord filbuster said:
Probably a little bit risky, backup anything important.

It could corrupt your drive if you lose power during conversion, but I have done this a few times before without issue.