Wednesday, July 30, 2008

From FAT32 to NTFS

I have an external usb drive which I use for backup and since I need to access it from Windows and Linux I kept it as it was when I bought it, i.e., FAT32 file system. However, FAT32 is not the best file system around :-) and since I now can access NTFS from Linux too, I wanted to convert it to NTFS.

Luckily the Windows utility convert.exe seems to work pretty well since it performs the conversion without destroying your data!

All I had to do was to run this command (the external hard disk has letter H:):

Convert H: /FS:NTFS /V /NoSecurity

and insert the current label of the disk, and everything went fine :-)

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I recently did the same. I converted my 250GB portable hard disk so I could put my 60GB Virtual Machine Image on it (FAT32 doesn't support files over 4GB)

Now my XBOX 360 won't read it! Yes, Microsoft's own darn console does not support their flagship file-system.

it was great being able to plug in and get all my music instantly. Not found a way to convert back without reformatting.

betto said...

Hi Marc
sorry to hear that...
actually I had checked before doing the transformation that I could access ntfs partions under linux, see, e.g., http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=217009