Re: NTFS Partition?

DarkestFire wrote:
I currently have 2 hard drives. 60gb NTFS Windows XP SP2, 250GB 4 partitions FAT 32. I have corruption on the second hard drive, files cannot be read. These files are mainly pictures, video clips, music files and html documents. Some people at work think I have a FAT corruption and have suggested switching partitions to NTFS as it might recover the files? Is this a plausible solution? Is there something I can do short of formatting and wiping everything?


Converting the FAT32 partitions to NTFS will prevent a recurrence of the corruption, but I don't think that the process will be able to repair/recover any damages files.

Personally, I wouldn't even consider using FAT32 when NTFS is an option. FAT32 has no security capabilities, no compression capabilities, no fault tolerance, and a lot of wasted hard drive space on volumes larger than 8 Gb in size. But your computing needs may vary, and there is no hard and fast answer.

You can safely convert your current hard drive to NTFS whenever desired, without having to format the partition and reinstall everything. As always when performing any serious changes, back up any important data before proceeding, just in case. A little advance preparation is also strongly recommended, so you can avoid any performance hits caused by the default cluster size:

Converting FAT32 to NTFS in Windows
http://www.aumha.org/a/ntfscvt.htm


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