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fat vs. ntfs

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by cnunez 1 view

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hi,
I am getting ready to upgrade from nt4.0 to win2k server. I have recently promote the server that I want as my active directory server. My situation is the following, my bootable drive is c: and for some reason it is formatted FAT. The other drives are NTFS. Is there any way that I could format that drive NTFS, without having to do a fresh install.
Is it recommended that I implement a new installation, instead of an upgrade? Keep in mind that I have been anticipating an upgrade, until Irealized that the bootable drive is FAT. I had everything ready for that upgrade but it does not seem as the best solution. Give me some advise. cn

11 replies

by dpalsen

I don't think there's any way to upgrade the root partition without a fresh install, and unfortunately active directory must be installed on an NTFS drive, so it might be best just to do a clean install.

by curacao_dejavu

You have to go to the command prompt to do that. The command is : convert c: /fs:ntfs
you won't loose any information.

I always prefer a clean install instead of a upgrade, however it depends of every situation so I can not give a comment on that. ( I have done both, in the end I liked the clean install better, but that was not in a production situation)

regards,

Leopold

by maxwell edison

The following is a direct quote from "Windows2000 - Getting Started" manual.

"You CAN convert an existing partition to NTSF during Setup. You can also convert file systems from FAT to NTSF at any time after setup by using Convert.exe from the command prompt."

Make sure you have ALL FILES BACKED UP before you do anything.

Personal opinion, if it was me, I'd re-partition, re-format to NTFS, and do a fresh install. There's much less likelyhood for problems.

Good luck,

Maxwell

by lordinfidel

On the issue of the conversion.

I have noticed some bugginess when converting a FAT32 partition to NTFS in 2k.

But since you are using NT4 (which would be just FAT16) you should not run into problems using convert.

My opinion, if I had to engineer this.....

Build yourself a temporary 2K domain controller and keep the NT4 server. Migrate the users over to the new domain.

Once the new domain is built and users are being authenticated by the new domain. Rebuild the NT4 machine using a new install.

Once the new DC is brought online, make it a GC server, use dcpromo on the temp DC, and remove it from the domain.

I have had very mixed results when trying to do a NT to 2K upgrade. So I have stayed with the traditional thinking that it is best to install fresh then to upgrade.

by chessmaster315

The answers in 2 and 3 are correct. You can convert to NTFS using the convert command.
However, remember that if you try to read files from a Win 9x computer system, you wont be able to read them if you have only NTFS. You may be better off to leave the file as FAT for compatability reasons. Once you convert to NTFS you cant go back to FAT or FAT32 unless you reformat your disk and you will loose all data. There are tradeoffs between updating and a clean install. Updating will keep most of your profiles, installed programs, data etc. Clean install will remove all those things but will also remove a lot of junk files that tend to accumulate, take up disk space
and decrease performance. You have to weigh the plusses and minuses anddecide which is more important to you. That is why both options are available.LB, MCP

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