The Mad Rants of a Raving Genius

NTFS is the file system of choice for Windows operating systems based off the NT kernel. It’s popularly used in Windows 2000, XP, and Vista, among others. It replaced FAT32, which was used by previous Windows and MS-DOS operating systems, such as Windows 95 and 98.

Why use NTFS? Well, there are plenty of good reasons, such as metadata and larger file sizes. FAT32 limited filesize to 4 GB, but it’s nigh-unlimited in NTFS. However, FAT32 has a bonus over NTFS in that it is easily read by other operating systems, such as Linux and Mac OS. Both other operating systems can only read NTFS partitions, so special software or drivers must be installed in order to give write access. That’s really the only advantage, but it doesn’t beat the 4 GB filesize limit or the 32 GB partition limit inherent in FAT32, making NTFS the all-around better choice if you just use Windows.

History lesson aside, how do you go about converting a FAT32 partition to NTFS? That’s rather easy, and it involves Windows’ convert utility. This tutorial should work in Windows XP as well as Windows Vista.

First off, click on the Start button and click Run (or just click in the search box in Vista). Type in ‘cmd.exe’ and hit Enter. Note: in Vista, you’ll need to hit Ctrl+Shift+Enter in order to get the Administrator privileges necessary to run the convert utility.

When the command prompt pops up, type in the following:

convert volume /fs:ntfs

replacing ‘volume’ with the drive letter of the volume you want to convert. So, if I was to convert my drive E to NTFS, I’d type:

convert e: /fs:ntfs

Hit Enter after typing this and wait for Windows to work. If the drive is being used, Windows will prompt you to restart so it can convert during the start-up process. Otherwise, it will work for a while and give you the all-clear. Also, if you’re wondering what else the convert utility can do, just type ‘convert /?’ and it will display a list of useful commands.

Now, say you want to convert NTFS to FAT32. Well, I really have no idea why you’d want to do this (unless you want interoperability between Windows and Linux and/or Mac OS), but it’s not as simple as typing a few things in the command line. In order to go from NTFS to FAT32, you’d need to buy a program like Partition Magic to do it or simply backup your data, erase the partition, and reformat it as FAT32, which could cause major headaches. My advice is to stick with NTFS unless you really need the compatibility FAT32 offers.

Anyways, there’s my little tutorial. If you run into problems, I suppose you could bug me about them, especially if my tutorial is incomplete or flawed. I’d hate to have something bad happen because I was wrong.