NTFS formatted harddrive with a FAT32 operating system?
 

I recently purchased a external harddrive for use with my old Windows ME (FAT32) driven PC. The harddrive came pre-formatted in FAT32 format, but I was curious if I would be able to use a NTFS formatted harddrive with my Windows ME operating system? Would my computer recognize the harddrive and allow me to transfer files back and (mostly) forth?

I know Windows ME is old, and always has been garbage, but that's where I'm at and I bought the harddrive as a means for storing my files and media, and likely transferring it to another, newer, PC some time down the road.

I really dislike the file size limitation imposed by FAT32, and thus would really like to be able to convert my external harddrive to NTFS, providing it would still be recognized by my PC.

Thanks!

Well, if the PC is running FAT32, and you want the external disk to be NTFS to avoid file size limit ... you shouldn't have any files on the machine that would break the limit?

But other than me being a smartass (not really because I bet you already considered that), and focusing on the idea that you want to use it in the future (where there is no such restriction), it looks like 9x Kernel (95/98/ME) needs 3rd-party support to run NTFS.

A google search of "windows ME NTFS" yields this as the first result:

http://www.sysinternals.com/Utilitie...Windows98.html

It might really not help you at all, but I'm exhausted and I need to sleep. Hope that helps!

EDIT: I like your signature by the way, it meant something to me last night :P

that sysinternals thing is not really that useful being read only :)

Personally, I'd just format it as fat32 and when/if you ever get a computer that can do ntfs natively, you could always reformat it then. It is also possible to convert it without reformating:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/l.../bb456984.aspx

to get around the size limitation, you can partition it in to several volumes.

As far as I know, there is no way to read an NTFS drive from a FAT32 partitioned drive. An NTFS drive can see fat32, but not the other way around. This is due to the more robust and complex nature of NTFS.

you should be able to use something like partition magic to get over the file size limitation if I recall correctly I had my last machine in FAT32 and it was well over the limit. I did the same thing with NTFS.

if by fat32 drive, you mean a windows 9x system, no, you actually can. (you can also install an ntfs compatible system on fat 32)

sysinternals made a program that could do it for you, sysinternals no longer exists though, but you can still get it.

http://www.softlookup.com/display.asp?id=25391

Erm, well... there are some half-truths here that need to be dispelled. First of all, NTFS and FAT32 are different items in the same category. I'm pretty sure you all get that and it's more likely that I'm misinterpreting some of these responses, but I just wan to make sure.

From a system installed on a FAT32 partition, you can not, by default, work with an NTFS partition. The primary reason for this is security. The security features available on NTFS are not on FAT32, and the FAT32-installed operating system does not have an y default measures to work with it.

That being said, there are third party utilities that can allow you to access it. They work, but also have a higher risk of failure, and thus data corruption, so unless your data is rather unimportant, I'd forego it.

The items I notice here are... why are you running Windows ME? You should be able to pick up Win98SE for like... pennies on the dollar these days. Windows ME was, by and large, the worst OS that Microsoft has ever put out. It's buggy and data corruption runs rampant on it. I'm shocked that anyone still HAS A WORKING ME install. Hell, MS themselves disavowed ME within months of it's release, and cut support for it as soon as they possibly could. Window 2000 has pretty easy hardware requirements to fill (not much tougher than ME), should be found pretty cheap, and works much better. I also believe that 2000 has NTFS support.

Seconding the 2k recommendation. Being built on the NT kernel, 2000 is native NTFS. It will read FAT32, but the 9x based Windows versions are incapable of working with NTFS natively.

Basically, if you're running FAT32 on your ME system, you're better off running FAT32 on your external drive as well. This is the solution that will cause you the least amount of headaches. Seeing as how you're unlikely to encounter an NT 4.0 install these days (I haven't seen one in years) and 2000 and XP both read FAT32, that's the file system that will provide the greatest amount of compatibility. The 4 GiB limit on file sizes might cause issues if you're working with dvd rips or something of that nature, but even then it's possible to work around it.

win2k has some major flaws for the corporate environment... any user account can grab system privileges in about 2 minutes, and from there escalate to local admin. go with XP, you can get a cheep copy of pro for $140 or less.

You can mount an ntfs volume on a system installed on fat32. no jury rigging, this took me 10 minutes to install windows, on the fat32 drive, then i mounted an ntfs partition and a fat 12 partition too.

http://i174.photobucket.com/albums/w...tuff/fat32.jpg

the utility i recommended is virtually flawless, it's not some hack job, the people over at sysinternals do quality work, so good i used there utilities over Microsoft's on a daily basis, so good, Microsoft bought them out. hell it uses the same driver the nt kernel uses.


back to the original problem at hand, just partition the drive in to many fat32 partitions, it will be messy but it will work just fine.

I may have misunderstood, I didn't think we were diagnosing for a corporate environment. And for home use, Win 2k works just fine. It's less demanding than XP, so for a slower PC would probably be the better option.

Sysinternals is good software, yes. But it would probably be easier just to work in FAT32, since every Windows version but 95 OSR1 and NT 4.0 can read it natively. The only time I'd foresee the file size limitation being an issue is if you're storing DVD images. At least, I know that's the only time I've ever encountered a 4GiB file; and even then, you could always break it down into a spanned archive.




I fail to see why this is necessary. FAT 16 was limited to a 2GiB volume size in most cases, but FAT 32 has an allocation table orders of magnitude larger and can support volume sizes up into the TiB range. I believe Jimellow's issue was with the 4GiB filesize limitation, which would be an issue with exceptionally large files. However, just about any off the shelf archiving program is capable of creating spanned archives these days, which means if the drive is only being used for back-up storage there's a simple work-around.

that was an aside more then anything. win2k is a thorn in my side, it's virtually impossible to lock down like winxp.

if you crank the cluster size up, you can make it one partition, but you waste a lot of space, about 16KB per file. f and after a reread of the OP, the 4 GB file size was the issue, not the partition size...

Yup. I think he's got it.

Some utilities will read/write NTFS from Dos/Win98 etc, but I wouldn't rely on them. Believe me, I've tried.