NTFS to FAT32 conversion

The only tool i have ever heard of doing this is partition magic.... and you can sometimes randomly loose data iirc

The obvious way to do it is to make a backup of every file on the drive, format the drive in fat32, and then replace the files.

any reason why you would want to?
 
FAT32 will support a 2Tb volume but Windows will only format (for marketing reasons) up to 32Gb. Remember there's also a 4Gb file size limit with FAT32.
 
Thanks chaps, the reason being that I want to make my music available to Linux and Windows on a separate hard drive that is currently formatted as NTFS, and my understanding is that Linux will only do FAT, so I need to have a FAT formatted drive to allow this.

Am I going about this the right way? (Linux n00b in case you haven't guessed!)

Edit: Or am I better off posting in the Linux section for this?
 
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Linux can read NTFS, there is also experimental (ie, "good luck with that") write support, but as far as I know, even that can only write into existing files rather than create new ones.

If you're sharing it on a network of course it doesn't matter.


If you only need to share it between YOUR penguin and YOUR Winbox, then you can install the Ext2 drivers for windows and format the drive to Ext2 or Ext3, which would be the best of all choices. Not got much personal experience of the windows e2fs driver, but my bro swears by it (he hates fat32 for some reason so he re-formats all his externals to ext3).
His bullet proof solution......
Make a 5MB Fat32 partition, put the driver installer in there, then format the rest as one big ext3 partition. That way any winbox can access it as it comes with it's own drivers.

AND you can do it all for free with cfdisk and mkdosfs and mke2fs (check the options to reduce or disable the reserved space, by default it reserves a little space in case root ever needs to write to the drive in the event of a full filesystem, as this is a data drive, it's not really needed, or can be set to stupid values like 0.01)
 
Linux NTFS Write support has been out of experimental and classed as fully stable since July 2006.

I use it in Ubuntu 8.04 and it's rock solid stable.
 
I should add if you're using virtual machines and mounting the Windows drive from a Linux virtual machine, write support is a very very bad thing! An inadvertant "rm -rf /windoze" is amusing to say the least...
 
Subterranean said:
I too have been using NTFS in linux for some time now. Read and write has been fine with no problems, very stable and is easy to set up.
Click to expand...

Time I updated my kernel then.

" CONFIG_NTFS_RW: x
x x
x This enables the partial, but safe, write support in the NTFS driver. x
x x
x The only supported operation is overwriting existing files, without x
x changing the file length. No file or directory creation, deletion or x
x renaming is possible. Note only non-resident files can be written to x
x so you may find that some very small files (<500 bytes or so) cannot x
x be written to. "

Funny the latest ubuntu live CD wouldn't do it, come to think of it, I think it wouldn't even read.
 
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