win 2000

[coaiti]

I wanna upgrade from 98se to 2000. is it true that it only operates in a ntfs filesystem? will this screw up all my back up data and my hdd which is in fat32? also does it have alot of security holes?

[Maddman]

You can use either fat32 of ntfs on the drive win2k will install on either system. It doesn't have many security holes especialy if you do all of the upgrades.

[Oni]

Personally, I'd format completely and install Windows 2000 on a clean, NTFS permission.

Oh, and it'll run on FAT, FAT32 AND NTFS. Just so you know.

[turd]

i have updated a few 98 systems to 2K, updated drivers and tweaked the 2k upgrade, and without exception i have needed to go back and format and install clean to get a stable system performing at peek -but this was just my experiances

[Oni]

Thats usually how it happens. Don't worry about it. I know few people (if any) that have successfully upgraded from 98 to 2k w/o having to format from some problem or another.

If you're gunna do a full format, use NTFS as your file system. Its more secure, and faster.

[o770]

i found this once http://www.zdnet.com/zdhubs/stories/special2000/0,9968,2426073,00.html looking for advices about the file systems. i finally decided to NTFS. The only impression i could add about it up to now is the fact it defrags a lot less than FAT32 - i like that.

[Über~PhLuBB]

What if one were to back up all his files to another HDD, format the first HDD, and install W2K on it using FAT32, then copy all the files back onto the first drive, and convert the first drive to NTFS.

Would that work? And how do you convert to another file system without formatting?

[joey_rjm5]

I was wondering that too phlubb

[Jon]

Originally posted by PhLuBB
What if one were to back up all his files to another HDD, format the first HDD, and install W2K on it using FAT32, then copy all the files back onto the first drive, and convert the first drive to NTFS.

Would that work? And how do you convert to another file system without formatting?

That should work fine.

To convert from FAT32 to NTFS you need to go to the command line and type CONVERT X: /FS:NTFS where X is the drive letter you want to convert. If you convert your C: (as long as that is your boot drive) it won't convert until you reboot. Other partitions will convert while still in Windows as long as they aren't being accessed (i.e. no pagefiles, programs installed and running on them).

If you're backing your data up there is no need to format FAT32 just to convert later. If reinstalling just go ahead and format it NTFS and then copy your files over. Will work fine.

[Über~PhLuBB]

Originally posted by Jon


That should work fine.

To convert from FAT32 to NTFS you need to go to the command line and type CONVERT X: /FS:NTFS where X is the drive letter you want to convert. If you convert your C: (as long as that is your boot drive) it won't convert until you reboot. Other partitions will convert while still in Windows as long as they aren't being accessed (i.e. no pagefiles, programs installed and running on them).

If you're backing your data up there is no need to format FAT32 just to convert later. If reinstalling just go ahead and format it NTFS and then copy your files over. Will work fine.

Ah, that was the next question I was going to ask, wether or not you can copy FAT32 files into an NTFS drive. Thanks.

[joey_rjm5]

Thanks for the info jon. That helps alot.