Howto convert existing win2k FAT32 install. to NTFS?

I prefer NTFS, but have been switching back and forth between win2k and XPpro using FAT32 images. Do I need to convert from the setup cd or what?

go to start menu, type this: convert *: /fs:ntfs

(*=the drive you want to convert)

if the drive you want to convert is your system drive, it will ask you if you want to force dismount....choose no, it will then ask you if you want to convert at the next restart...choose yes. next reboot, it will convert.

What are the advantages of ntfs? will age of empires 2 work? will all the games work? What if im networked with a winxp comp and its fat32, will they be able to communicate?

i dont see why they wouldnt run

ntfs basicly is just more secure and doesnt need to be scandisked every time your computer gets cut off by accident

i think it may use space a bit better but its nothing to write home about

personly i would stay fat 32 becuase 98 cant read a ntfs hard drive (i ran into problems iwth that when my 2k system crashed)

The only disadvantage of NTFS is that you cannot access any NTSF partition under DOS in case of a OS failure. Or you could use NTFS-DOS. I use Drive Image Pro to create and restore regular backups so it's no issue for me really. What I like about NTFS is that;

NTFS has built-in error correction, it provides the ability to recover from file system errors and perform sector sparing to remap data to good clusters and mark bad clusters as unusable. Using a method called hot fixing, every storage device write is monitored and written sectors are checked for integrity. If the verification fails, the corrupted or questionable sectors are flagged, and the data is rewritten to another sector(s) on the disk. Sector hot fixing is performed automatically by the file system and does not report error messages to any applications. NTFS also logs all changes to the file system so that changes may be undone or reapplied if a discrepancy is found or if a system failure or power loss causes damage.

The Diskeeper folks published some performance results. NTFS was fastest followed by FAT and then FAT32. The best cluster size was 4K. 512byte clusters (default for FAT32) was worst. They found that a disk intensive task moved "from FAT-32 512-byte clusters to NTFS 4K-byte clusters makes the job run in one fifth the time!"

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