I think lately NTFS has been giving me some trouble. Now before finding out it that is the case (which could take a long time), I wanted to try a format and go for FAT32. I remember I had an early copy of Win XP, it had an option to go with FAT32 in the setup wizard's fdisk feature, but now I swear I can't find it anywhere on the retail copy. :oops:

yes U can, get a Win98 bootable.. format with it and run WinXP Pro Setup.

Windows XP's Disk Administrator won't let you create FAT32 partitions greater than about 40GB. I'm fairly certain this restriction applies to the initial disk configuration when installing XP too. According to Microsoft large FAT32 partitions aren't supported. Of course you can always use a partitioning program such as Partition Magic to create a FAT32 partition of pratically any size and you can then install XP on it fine. I think Microsoft have limited XP's ability to create larger FAT32 partitions so people are more likely to use a file system that encourages people to completely ditch older operating systems. It can sometimes be a pain in the arse trying to get data off an NTFS partition when you've booted into 98.

Of course NTFS has many advantages that make it the logical choice for use in XP, and it's the one I'd recommend. FAT32 does have less overhead, so you might see minor perfromance improvements, but I'd rather have NTFS's security and reliability.

.... I think he has NTFS and wants to switch to FAT32 .... there nor way to do with normal tools ... user 3rd party tools like Partition expert (http://www.acronis.de)
or boot with winXP CD during setup the format disk option can be usefull for u

Well yeah, actualy I want to have an option in the future when I format my PC and install XP to choose FAT32 if I want... depends how reliable it becomes for me I might need a good way of going FAT32 in the future as I format a few times a year.

Right now I want to try FAT32 and see if my PC handles it better than NTFS; if not, I'll stick with NTFS. Yeah, the XP CD does have a format feature, but the retail CD I have here only gives me an option along the lines of: "Format with NTFS /quick or /long". There is no FAT32 option in sight.

However I will give it a try by using a Win9x CD and putting FAT32 on there, then I will install Win XP and go from there, hopefully it will recognize that I have FAT32 ready to go.

Thanks a lot guys, thanks for the quick replys.

and i would like to add whatever he said

no command line /w CD
start the normal setup as if u would install WinXP
during the setup u can format to NTFS or FAT32 ... after that simply abort the setup

ThunderChicken is right. Though it isn't a 40 GB limit but a 32 GB limit to format to FAT32 from WinXP. This limit was introduced in Win2K. FDISK should have a limit of about 512 GB when creating partitions and FORMAT a limit of about 128 GB when formatting a partition. So you should be able to format to FAT32 with FDISK/FORMAT.

I have to warn you though! FAT32 performance decreases with increasing partitionsize while NTFS performance hardly does! With larger partitionsizes NTFS performance is superior to FAT32 performance and this superiority increases with every MB. I don't really know where the break even point lies but it won't be more then a partitionsize of a few GB at most (probably much less). So formatting a partition of 32 GB or more with FAT32 will give a noticable performancedrop compared to NTFS. Maybe you should consider creating multiple partitions of smaller size.

Personally I would stick to NTFS. Maybe there are other ways around your problems.


Also read:
Limitations of the FAT32 File System in Windows XP
NTFS Preinstallation and Windows XP

If NTFS is giving u problems ur drive must have bad sectors. NTFS goes wild if some sectors are bad Try running a chkdsk on startup.

if you HAVE to use FAT32 make sure to use a Windows ME start-up disk for partitioning and formatting in FDISK. The ME disk will let you make and format large partitions, all earlier versions (95, 98, 98SE) will limit partition size to less than 6GB...

No, the Win9X FDISK will limit to 512 GB, the WinME bootdisk will go over that.

Fdisk.exe Unable to Partition Drives Larger Than 512 Gigabytes

I youst to have my 60GB formatted in fat32 when i was running Win ME and then XP and I've gotta say that vegeta is right when he says the bigger the HD the slower FAT32 goes. If you looking for performance stick with the NTFS....besides what problems are you getting? NTFS is far more stable than FAT16/32 could ever be.

yes would be really interesting what is the problem rthat u want to downgrade ???

can't imagine that there is a real reason to do so ..

The only problem with NTFS is if you have to boot into DOS mode (and I do mean BOOT ... not drop to a DOS window from within Windoze), you won't be able to see or get to any of the NTFS partitions. The obvious solution is to convert the NTFS partition to FAT32 via Partition Magic or any other program that can handle that task.

As to performance issues, I have a pair of WD 120GB (8MB buffer) drives running in RAID 0 (striped), both formated in FAT32. They run like a raped ape and are used primarily for gaming. I have another single WD 120GB drive (also 8MB buffer) formated in NTFS that I use for video streaming (DVD ripping, video format conversion, watching movies from, etc.) and although there is an obvious performance difference in benchmarks, under real-world conditions you'd be hard pressed to tell the difference between ANY of the drives. As to reliability, I've never had any problems with either format so I think it's a wash.

You (dzjepp) stated in your original post that you "think" your NTFS partition is giving you some trouble. What are you basing that on? What sort of symptoms are you seeing that would lead you to believe your NTFS partition has somehow become corrupt or is failing? When was the last time you defragged this partition? If you can provide additional information (clues) as to what kind of problem(s) you're having, we might better be able to analyse the situation and provide althernatives to reformatting or file system conversion.

Old Fart
aka AL

I can't see that not being able to access an NTFS via dos is a problem since you have programs out there like NTFSReader which allow you to read/copy/delete data on an NTFS drive while in dos.

I've made myself a tidy cd which boots into dos 6.22 with cd-rom drivers and loads this application so I can recover data from my NTFS drives if needed. This was made when i first switched to NTFS and I can honestly say that I've never needed to use it.