NTFS to Fat32

noob · 17 Aug 2007 at 15:12

I've got an external hdd which is 500gb around half of it is filled with data which I don't want to lose. Is there any program I can use to convert it from NTFS to Fat32 without losing the data?

wesley · 17 Aug 2007 at 15:29

why?

NTFS>FAT32, FAT32 will not hold any file that is bigger than 4GB

noob · 17 Aug 2007 at 15:34

All my files are below 4gb. My XBOX and DVD player with USB port only accepts Fat32.

UniqueID · 17 Aug 2007 at 15:37

if you have free space on your hard disk you can create a seperate partition and put files you want onto it.
otherwise you'll have to format the disk mate

ns400r · 17 Aug 2007 at 16:09

Conversion from NTFS back to Fat32 isn't an officially supported option.
There was a third party tool available many years back but from memory it wasn't 100% reliable.

Best bet would be to copy all your data to another hard drive and then partition/format the drive with the file system(s) of your choice before copying your data back.

Sarduk · 18 Aug 2007 at 03:00

wesley said:
why?

NTFS>FAT32, FAT32 will not hold any file that is bigger than 4GB

FAT32 is "faster" in most respects than NTFS.

bledd · 18 Aug 2007 at 08:40

JimpsEd said:
FAT32 is "faster" in most respects than NTFS.

i call bs

fat32 is only faster on smaller (older and crapper) drives

-edit, plus the data integrity is far better on ntfs

Curiosityx · 18 Aug 2007 at 14:30

JimpsEd said:
FAT32 is "faster" in most respects than NTFS.

Unfortunately although in some respects you may be right, FAT32 was popular when drives were no larger that 20Gb in size, very manageable using a FAT file system and quick as you have stated but considering that drives are now readily available that hit the 1TB mark FAT has since had its day unless you wish to partition a disk into multiple 137Gb volumes.

Also dont forget that you lose such options as encryption, compression, quotas and file level security invaluable to a business environment.

Yes NTFS can be slower due to small clusters that may fragment data cluster chains the extra overhead of security checks, compression and encryption, but it makes much more more efficient than its predecessor.

noob · 18 Aug 2007 at 16:15

cheers for the replies guys will try and source another HDD to backup my data.

whitecrook · 18 Aug 2007 at 19:21

turn off atime updating and ntfs will speed up *a lot*.

bledd · 19 Aug 2007 at 00:01

what is that and how do you do it?

M0KUJ1N · 19 Aug 2007 at 00:13

Last Accessed Timestamp IIRC?

Do a google search for that or NTFS performance tuning and you should find various hacks to speed up NTFS.

I can think of a legitimate reason to do what the OP wants actually- if the disk is being used on multiple OSes then it makes sense to have it formatted as FAT32 for compatibility

Eddie · 19 Aug 2007 at 14:53

M0KUJ1N said:
Last Accessed Timestamp IIRC?

Do a google search for that or NTFS performance tuning and you should find various hacks to speed up NTFS.

I can think of a legitimate reason to do what the OP wants actually- if the disk is being used on multiple OSes then it makes sense to have it formatted as FAT32 for compatibility

Thanks a lot for that. I had a little play and noticed that it solved a problem I was having with IE7; whenever I closed IE7 and then immediately click the XP start menu it would pause for a second or two before opening, changing the NtfsDisableLastAccessUpdate to 1 fixed it.

I found a quick guide for it here if anyone wants to take a look.

I've definitely noticed an overall speed increase too, which is nice

Sarduk · 19 Aug 2007 at 18:12

bledd. said:
i call bs

fat32 is only faster on smaller (older and crapper) drives

-edit, plus the data integrity is far better on ntfs

Not really, most people looking to squeeze every last drop of performance from their rig maintain smaller partitions across (say) a 500GB drive - one for OS, one for games, one for documents etc.

In this case, FAT32 is generally faster.

http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/windows2000serv/reskit/core/fncc_fil_yula.mspx?mfr=true

• The FAT structure is simpler.
• The FAT folder size is smaller for an equal number of files.
• FAT has no controls regulating whether a user can access a file or a folder; therefore, the system does not have to check permissions for an individual file or whether a specific user has access to the file or folder. This advantage is minimal because Windows 2000 still has to determine if the file is read-only, or whether the file is on a FAT or NTFS volume.

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/setup/expert/tulloch_partition.mspx

Format it using the FAT32 file system. Although the version of NTFS in Windows XP has features that make it perform better than earlier versions of NTFS, you can still eek out some performance gains for small volumes by formatting them as FAT32 instead of NTFS. I'm not overly concerned about the lack of security from not having pagefile.sys protected by NTFS permissions since it's an unreadable binary file. If someone hacked into my system, they wouldn't need to bother with the paging file anyway.