why would you want to change from ntfs to fat32?

Question

i have been reading up on changing from fat32 to ntfs and lots of people are saying that you cant change back or that it is harder to do so. everyone also says that ntfs is far better than fat32 so why would you want to go back?

Answer 1

fat32 is generally prefered if u are going to install any older operating system like windows 98 or lower..

or if someone is using win98 and win xp as dualboot..
98 will not recognize ntfs partition

as for switching from fat32 to ntfs and vice versa is easy if u use a good disk management software such as Acronis Disk director..or partition magic...

Answer 2

As everyone is saying here windows 98 cannot access an NTFS drive. There are a number of advantages:

**NTFS provides increased security
**FAT32 struggles to handle volumes over about 50GB, causing "drive full" warning when there is still space available
**NTFS provides increased read write speed, thus increasing overall performance
**NTFS also provides increased reliability.

Its not true that you can't go back to FAT32, it's just you can't convert you drive back to FAT32 without wiping it. You can convert it from FAT32 to NTFS using windows XP, however if you then want to convert it back to FAT32, you will have to entirely format your hard disk(thus wiping all data), and then when reformatting it format it using the FAT32 format. Alternatively you could partition your drive so that you have a FAT32 partition, and a NTFS partition, allowing you to have XP and later, and 98 and earlier effectively on the same drive. Bare in mind though you wont be able to access data on the XP partition from the 98 partition, however you will be able to do it visa versa.


Hope this helps :-)

Answer 3

In a nutshell... you wouldn't want to go back.

NTFS is a much better file system than FAT32. I beleive FAT32 first came out with Windows 95 and was replaced with NTFS when XP came out.

NTFS saves you so much of your hard drive space compared to FAT32 that you can't believe the difference.

It's all about "file allocation space" and NTFS is so much more efficient.

Google them both and read up on it if you need more info than this.

Hope this helps.

Answer 4

ntfs file system is better than fat32 and you cant go back. its just a more advance way to store files on the harddrive. fat is for windows 95. there is more security features with ntfs.

Answer 5

There are 3rd party applications, like Neuros OSD, that read FAT 32 and not NTFS. I was looking to do this because I have an external harddrive that I want to use with Neuros but it is NTFS. I'd rather convert it than go out and buy another one.

Answer 6

Within XP you can't. You can change from FAT32 to NTFS but not vise versa.

Answer 7

In Unix, NTFS is not writable without fuse.
So if you have a NAS, it will likely not be able to write to an external HDD formatted in a NTFS file system. You also won't be able to write to it in OS X and Linux/BSD OS without Fuse.

Also, NTFS is not natively supported in Windows 98 or older.

Answer 8

NTFS partitions are not readable in an Win 98 system. So if your PC had both 98 and XP you could only read the disk from XP.

Answer 9

Hi, if u are dual booting with previous operating systems so in order for those systems to see ur drive u need FAT32, the only other reason u would want to go back is to make ur system unstable and fill it with bugs. I hope I helped.
Good Luck!

Answer 10

http://thundercloud.net/information-avenue/ntfs-vs-fat32/