WinXp, NTFS can I confert back to fat32?

[BC]

Ok I am getting some errors after a reboot. I was wondering if I can go back to Fat32? Is there a progie that will let me go to Fat32? I knew back in the old days that the answer was NO!! But with the birth of this FANTASTIC new OS winXP is there a converter to go back?

Or can I use this thing of moving user settings and format a new HDD into Fat32 install winXP then import the user settings to get all my stuff set up the same way?

Partition magic?

[muchmark]

I remember reading on the M$ site you cant go from NTFS to Fat32 without reformating. A clean reinstall is the best thing IMO.

[BipolarBill]

Partition magic? Yes. Partition Magic 7.0 allows you to convert back to FAT32.

[Kiierun]

I use partition magic on a weekly basis with my company. We have to take over service of hardware/software and 9 times out of 10 it's wrongly setup. I prefer the entire suite of part magic and deploy center. with the two you can first make a backup image of your OS then use part magic to change the structure back to fat32. This software is worth it's weight in gold.

[BC]

Well PM7.0 didnt work It comes back with an error about file is compressed or sparse any thoughts?

[BipolarBill]

Darnit! I hate when that happens! I remember now that the %SYSTEM% drive can rarely be converted back. Gah!

What kind of errors were you getting, BC? You know...in NTFS?

[BC]

well it is someone else's PC and they have an nForce board. Some stuff like memory or the NIC, BIOS, or something else with that **** board wasn't too stable so it just died on them once. I got it back up and running (Flashed the BIOS) but after about a day of running maybe a couple of boots it asked to install new Hardware and then it crashed. When I went to boot it up to see what the error was the NTFS.sys driver was bad.

I was going to convert it to Fat32 before it got to that point --- I was too late. Well I put in a new NIC, and changed the Memory. Put the BIOS back to the original version from a backup. Then Flashed it again with the new BIOS installed the newest nForce Drivers from nVidia and defragmented the drive. It seems to work ok now.

Does anyone know how to fix the error message unable to load ..../drivers/ntfs.sys ?

[BipolarBill]

Perhaps the driver was corrupt. In that case, you could first "Expand" (with MSCONFIG) a fresh one to the \WINDOWS|WINNT\SYSTEM32\DLLCACHE folder and then the SYSTEM32\DRIVERS folder. System File Protection pulls one from the DLLCACHE folder when you try to delete any system file.

Another method is simply to boot from the CD and select Install and then Repair. That little trick fixes many a Win2K/XP problem.

[Kiierun]

Originally posted by BC
Well PM7.0 didnt work It comes back with an error about file is compressed or sparse any thoughts?

Converting a partition from NTFS to FAT or FAT32 will cause you to lose all security settings on all files and directories that you may have created on that partition. This is because FAT and FAT32 do not support security attributes inherent with the NTFS file system.

Windows 2000/XP NTFS partitions that have sparse files, reparse points, or encrypted files should not be converted to FAT or FAT32 with this version of PartitionMagic.

Copyright © 1994-2001 PowerQuest Corporation. All rights reserved.

Ok with this in mind surely you are not compressing the drive. If so nuke it and never do this again. =) then next step would be for me to figure out just what in the hell a reparse point is. So this is possible you just have to figure out what to do to make it work. http://www.powerquest.com

[BC]

Bill I have tried the repair thingie but I guess I did not konw what I was looking at doing. It had a prompt and I did not know what to put in.

Kiierun--No not compressed. And don't care if I loose any protection at this point.

I will have to try it tonight and see what the error message is and get more technical with PowerQuest search strings.

[HRM]

BC...Is the MB a ECS K7S5A by any chance?

I was getting those errors...lots of strange errors one was that NTFS one. I flashed the bios (I know you did that) put in a 465 watt PSU and had to pull out one stick of DDR2100 that is being RMA'ed. Everything is dandy now. I also reinstalled XP Home which did the repair thing. I also can not use the latest driver for my leadtek ti200. The newest one gives me trouble. I did all of the above in one day..so I can't be sure what exactly did it.
If you have 2 sticks of ram. Try taking one out one at a time. With the bad one, my system will not post, the other 256 seems fine.

[BC]

Well it is a MSI nForce board not sure the number.

I had 256mb Crucial memory and replaced it with another Crucial stick then replaced that stick with a Corsair stick. AND replaced the NIC from the onboard one to a Netgear. I could not connect to the network with the onboard nic so I replaced it.

All seems stable now.