Re: USB external drive help, NTFS, FAT32, EXT3

Matt Giwer <jull43@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I haven't been near Windows in years but it is my impression that NTFS is
more reliable that FAT32. Why don't you like it?

I prefer FAT32 over NTFS. Apart from the problem with NTFS being a
proprietary filesystem, I have seen some serious problems (on Microsoft
Windows based machines), where the filesystem locks everybody out,
preventing access to the files, including the Administrator accounts. On
at least three separate occasions it has been necessary for the system
administrator to format the drive and erase all the data, that would
have otherwise been recoverable had the drive been formatted FAT32. This
occured on third party machines running only Microsoft Windows XP. These
were just conventional installations with no security or drive
encryption being used. Microsoft Windows just crashes, requiring
reinstallation, and the drives become inaccessible, even when used as a
secondary drive on another machine for data recovery purposes.

Mark.

--
Mark Hobley
Linux User: #370818 http://markhobley.yi.org/

.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: convert external drive?
    ... >> and D: (NTFS) drives. ... Right now, everything is FAT32, and the external drive is ... So unless you have some special need for a FAT32 partition on your ... All, or virtually all, commercially-available USB external hard drives ...
    (microsoft.public.windowsxp.general)
  • Re: pagefile
    ... Unless you know WHY you are clinging to FAT32, use NTFS all the way with Win2K and later. ... The rest of the page file can be wherever you have room, and it can be divided into several smaller page files on different drives. ... But WinXP is so much better at managing this than previous Windows versions, ...
    (microsoft.public.windows.file_system)
  • Re: convert external drive?
    ... > and D: (NTFS) drives. ... Right now, everything is FAT32, and the external drive is ... So unless you have some special need for a FAT32 partition on your ... All, or virtually all, commercially-available USB external hard drives ...
    (microsoft.public.windowsxp.general)
  • Re: partition&page file
    ... large USB hard drives being commonly available. ... NTFS can be more secure and it has some additional ... need to get data off of the drive, or do some manual repairs to files, FAT32 ... the partition from another operating system, like 98, or LINUX. ...
    (microsoft.public.windowsxp.basics)
  • Re: NTFS hard drives problem
    ... Only slightly relevant to your post but, seeing as you are wildly swapping hardware aournd all over the place and you mentioned converting from Fat32 to NTFS - before converting,, you should of course shunt everything up away from the front end of the hard disk being converted to attain an optimal cluster size. ... tried to install XP from scratch. ... Do NTFS-formatted drives simply refuse ...
    (microsoft.public.windowsxp.hardware)