For video work, NTFS means no longer worrying about the 2 - 4 gig file size limit, along with increased security options. On the down side, if you are on a network, other users may be unable to see your NTFS drives, assuming you'd want them to anyway. And of course, if you run a dual-boot system, your other OS may have problems using a NTFS drive without special, add-on software. While the convert program will switch a drive over to NTFS from fat32, your options are limited should you want to go back -- M/soft says reformat the drive. Programs like Partition Magic say they'll do the trick, but the success rate is not 100% -- if it fails you best have a full backup.

Thanks for the help. I'll see how it goes.

(I'm just worried about my current files on my D drive).

Users on a network should have no problem seeing the NTFS drives, but if they are running Win98, they still won't be able to use any of the files on the drive which are greater than 4 gig in size.

John

BACK UP! Backup, backUP, before converting.

Just notice this & I thought I would like to share some reality on this NTFS thing.

Nevermind about the theorectical 2-4Gig thing.

In reality, it doesn't work. Anything bigger than 2 gig will be in trouble.
So far the biggest capturing I,ve tried is a 16 hrs wmv capturing on a NTFS system, result is a no go even though it's only a 4+gig file.

I hope mine is only a isolated case.

Regards

A friend of mine recorded 13 hours of the SCI-FI channel in full mpeg2 and had a file size of around 53GB. He was able to successfully edit out the parts he wanted using Vegas, XPpro and NTFS. It took a very long time to save his edits but everyghint worked.

Steve

I routinely have files of 13GB on Win2000 NTFS with no problems. But it certainly ate a TON space on my C: drive when I converted. No one mentioned that lose of space arising simply from converting or using NTFS. I don't regret the increased filesizes, but I certain regret the loss of so much disk space on C:

I've just been editing on a 20 gig file with no probs. Love NTFS! Other than compatibility, is there any other advantage to FAT32?

The only real advantage of FAT32 is that if you have a total system failure, you still might be able to get to your drive by booting a stand-alone MS-DOS disk. This might allow you to rescue some critical files.

Of course, that's only in theory. Knock-on-wood that I never have to put it in practice, because I go NTFS 100%.

WWW.NTFS.COM has a free utility to access NTFS drives from DOS in case you have to boot from a floppy.

"NTFS Reader for DOS is a freeware tool that provides read access to NTFS partitions within the MS-DOS environment. You can preview files on NTFS and copy files from NTFS to FAT volumes or network drives."

John

Thanks, John. Much appreciated.

I have found 'convert.exe' in my windows folder, but the program won't run.

I d-click on it, and a DOS screen flashes for a second, then nothing.

I could not find the program on my XP disk.

Any help would be great.

You must open a "Command Prompt" window.
Look in Start/Programs/Accessories/Command Prompt.

To change from FAT 32 to NTFS.........................Open a Command Prompt and type: Convert C: /FS:NTFS
Make sure there is a space between the C: and the foward slash (/). "C" represents the letter of the drive/partition to be converted. Once you press enter it will ask you for confirmation.........

NTFS is certainly the way to go. It is more robust and support larger file sizes (all said before). If you need to access and NTFS volume from Win 9X, the folks at Winternals.com make an NTFS driver for 9X. Great on a dual boot system. For NT, they also make a FAT32 driver. So you can mix and match.

Chris

Partition Magic 7.0 costs a little money (about $50 I think), but it's great for adding, deleting partitions, converting from NTFS to FAT or vice versa, and all from within the XP environment (unless you're converting the boot disk).

One FAT32 advantage is the ability to use Norton Ghost to creat backup drive images. I've heard you can do this with NTSF, if you run a MS file called "Sysprep", that's supposed to remove some security features that ordinarily prevent ghosting from working. Has anybody out there used Sysprep in this way ??

I can also recommend Partition Magic. It has served me well through the years.
///d@

Thanks for all your help. I ended up using salad's suggestion (opening the command propt), and it worked great. Quick, and all my files are fine. The detailed instructions helped a ton.

Partition Magic seems to be a great program, and I may need it at a later time.

Thanks again, Jon

jboy,
I use Norton Ghost 2002 a lot. It will ghost a NTFS partition......however, it can NOT write/save the image to another NTFS partition, except perhaps accross a network. So, I keep a small FAT32 partition on the slave drive just for GHOSTS. You can move the saved Ghost image to a NTFS partition, and even restore from there.

I'm not familiar with sysprep.

Powerquest (who make Partition magic) also do a competitor to Norton's Ghost in the shape of Drive Image.

Has anyone tried to use powerquet image drive 4.0 to backup an XP installation? It seems that it can;t be installed on XP but does on windows 2000. Actually there is no need to install it to make it work...you just need to create the boot disk on windows 2000..but would the image created by the boot disk version of image 4.0 work on xp imaging?

Support for XP was introduced in version 5.0 I believe