I formatted a new hdd with win xp professional.

[SF2MJ]

I recently put a new hdd in my pc tower and formatted it.I have windows xp professional.I used it's admin tools and formatted it through that.My other 2 hdd i have in my pc are FAT32.I formatted them when i had windows 98 se.

But this new hdd i formatted with win xp only let me use NTFS when i was formatting it.I didn't have a choice of FAT32.

Anyway i went ahead and formatted anyway.And i find that even though the new hdd has NTFS, and my 2 old hdd have FAT32.I could still transfer files from my older hdd's to my new one and use them...even though they are 2 different formats.

I thought you couldn't do that.Is it ok to do that?.Will any of my files be corrupt if i transfer them from a hdd that has FAT32 to a hdd that has NTFS?.

Or could it be that my older hard drives have somehow already converted the new hdd to FAT32 without me knowing about it?.

Because my new hdd still says it's NTFS.

Any help would be appreciated.

[Gryph]

NTFS is good. You can transfer between different formats easily. It's just that old OSes like Win98 and 95 won't be able to read it. No need to panic, everything is good. NTFS is better, much better than FAT32.

[Wizard]

Who uses FAT16 on XP

[Agozer]

Who uses FAT16 on XP

More importantly, who would use FAT16/32 at all in XP after being introduced to NTFS?

[ken_cinder]

I do. My primary drive is Fat32 for performance reasons.

My secondary drive is NTFS with itty bitty clusters for storage reasons.

[Robert]

For those that don't know, XP and win2000 natively support fat32 and fat16. SF2MJ you have nothing to worry about.

[SF2MJ]

Thanks guys for the info.

Crisis over.

[Wizard]

They're are reasons why NTFS is better on XP.

 

The only good thing of useing FAT32 is if your dual boot with 2k and an old version of windows that can run your classics.

[ken_cinder]

And there are reasons why a gamer chooses FAT32.

Even Microsoft themselves did a performance benchmark with the 2 filesystems to see what was the better choice.

For performance, FAT32 did somewhat better than NTFS, but ONLY if the volume sizes were small.

This is why my on my primary drive I have 2 8GB partitions for my games, and I use my other drive for storage and keep my pagefile on it, in it's own 1024MB partition.

[Wizard]

And there are reasons why a gamer chooses FAT32.

Even Microsoft themselves did a performance benchmark with the 2 filesystems to see what was the better choice.

For performance, FAT32 did somewhat better than NTFS, but ONLY if the volume sizes were small.

This is why my on my primary drive I have 2 8GB partitions for my games, and I use my other drive for storage and keep my pagefile on it, in it's own 1024MB partition.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

I'm a gamer and I don't use FAT32 :\

IMO NTFS is better for XP.

 

Your pagefile is rediculusly high, what do you do other then gaming and word processing? If you do massive media editing then, I understand.

[ken_cinder]

And there are reasons why a gamer chooses FAT32.

Even Microsoft themselves did a performance benchmark with the 2 filesystems to see what was the better choice.

For performance, FAT32 did somewhat better than NTFS, but ONLY if the volume sizes were small.

This is why my on my primary drive I have 2 8GB partitions for my games, and I use my other drive for storage and keep my pagefile on it, in it's own 1024MB partition.

I'm a gamer and I don't use FAT32 :\

IMO NTFS is better for XP.

 

Your pagefile is rediculusly high, what do you do other then gaming and word processing? If you do massive media editing then, I understand.

 

I do alot of everything, including video editing and alot of archiving, and a 1GB pagefile isn't rediculously high. What might I ask do you consider to be a "normal" size pagefile?

Most recommend 1.5x your physical RAM (Mine being 512MB, that would be a 768MB Pagefile), I opted for a little more.

[Wizard]

If I did the *recommended,* I'd be using 1.5 GB for my pagefile, but I don't, I just use 768.

[Ryuken]

isn't NTFS only good for servers and other stuff that needs high security ?? just wondering

[Robert]

NTFS has lots of advantages.

 

Let's describe each system.

 

FAT (or FAT16) has a 16-bit system of file pointers. There can only be a maximum of 65536 (2**16) clusters. On large drives, this leads to huge clusters. The maximum size of a cluster can be 65536 bytes. This gives a total maximum HD size of 4.2 gigs. On today's computers, that is not very useful.

 

FAT32 was invented for Windows 95. It has a 32-bit system, which means you can have 4.2 billion clusters, or a maximum HD size of 275 terabytes. This will be useful for a number of years.

 

NTFS is said to be unlimited, although I suspect it has the same limitation as FAT32. It has extra features such as on-the-fly compression; on-the-fly encryption of individual folders; security specific on each folder; a drive letter that spans several physical disks; support for RAID; transaction-tracking which allows for repair of a damaged disk; auditing.

 

NT4 can use NTFS and FAT (FAT32 wasn't invented back then)

 

W2K and XP can use all 3 systems.

 

DOS only does FAT

 

Win95/98 can do FAT and FAT32.

 

A tool is available to allow DOS to read NTFS.

Another tool allows Win95/98 to read and write NTFS, bypassing the security but no access to encrypted files.

 

Here some links for useful reading about NTFS:

 

http://www.digit-life.com/articles/ntfs/

 

http://www.ntfs.com/

[Wizard]

It was hard enough just to get NTFS working on a crappy linux box