NTFS Newbie Questions

[ACE101]

I performed a search on the forum for NTFS info and seemed to get some conflicting responses. It seems that NTFS is a good thing, but I have a couple questions.

- How do you boot from an NTFS system with a floppy? In a pinch, is there a way?

- Follow-up question....if the answer to the NTFS boot question is, there's no way to boot to NTFS with removable media, is it smart to have a FAT32 partition which would allow me to debug problems with the drive? Any other ways to deal with this? How about burning a CD-R for boot that supports NTFS?

- Will any version of Partition Magic convert FAT32 to NTFS without forcing 512 byte clusters?

- Will the Speed Disk in Norton Utilities 2002 defrag both the file areas of any size cluster as well as defraging the swap area?

I want to buy XP today but it looks like I'll need some additional tools to get the job done right. Any recomendations are appreciated.

Ron

 

[Finite]

With Xp you can create a "boot disk" with a flopy disk. You simply insert the disk go into my computer and right click your flopy drive icon. In the menu that opens up click format and then in the format menu put a check in the box to create a dos start up diisk. Then click start and there you go. As file systems go NTFS is one of the best arround. Its more secure and way more stable than FAT32. Stay away from Partition Magic. personally I have had bad experiences with it but thats been about a year and the problems that I had with it may have been fixed by now. If I used it to resize my dos partition it would turn it into a non dos and then if I removed Partition Magic my boot partition would become unbootable.

On the side of Norton Utilities. I would stay away from this suite of programs. I have spoke to way to many people that have problems with it and the things it does you can do manually with out it. As for wether or not it defrags the swap file I cannot say because I have never personally used it (and I never will).

 

[ACE101]

So the tools that come with Windows XP are sufficient to deal with the NTFS management? I'm not used to that! They let you defrag including the swap file? Also do they let you change the partition information at all?

Ron

 

[Broadkipa]

To defrag the swap file you need Diskeeper by Executive Software, this will defrag the swap file before you boot into Windows. You can't defrag the swap file while Windows is running . Its a great program and Windows XP ships with a cut down ver as standard.
On another note, you can boot your computer with the XP cd-rom if you need to, providing your computer will let you select it in the bios. Quite a lot of options on the Cd to get you out of trouble.

 

[Shadow07]

To answer your questions:

1. Yes and no. You can put the NT boot files on a floppy or anyother removable bootable media (NTLDR, NTDETECT.COM, and BOOT.INI), but, and REALLY BUT, you will only be able to boot into one of your NT installations on your HD. You cannot boot into NT off just a floppy alone. This is not doable, like Linux can.

3. I believe Version 6 will. You will not be able to use Parition Magic if you have installed/upgraded to Windows 2000 Advanced Server or Server. Only the Professional version is supported.

4. Speed Disk will be able to defrag any cluster size and I believe the swapfile, even the MFT while still online. (I will have to re-verify this as my brain is a little off today). But, I would strongly agree with Broadkipa. DisKeeper is a MUCH Better defragmenter than Speed Disk, especially 7.0 SE.

 

[Finite]

Dude, what do you mean "1. Yes and no. You can put the NT boot files on a floppy or anyother removable bootable media (NTLDR, NTDETECT.COM, and BOOT.INI), but, and REALLY BUT, you will only be able to boot into one of your NT installations on your HD. You cannot boot into NT off just a floppy alone. This is not doable, like Linux can."

In XP you can create a bootable flopy disk. Now wether or not it contains the files needed to run fdisk or format I do not know because I always use disk management for this. I create the bootable disks for flashing my bios or running a disk utility called GWSCAN. The XP utilities will be sufficient for most everything else.

 

[Shadow07]

Sorry. I was refering to Windows NT 4 and 2000. I am familiar with the creating of a bootdisk within Windows XP. Must have missed the part about the author wanting to use Windows XP.

 

[Haden]

Of course you can boot with bootable floppy, but don't forget that DOS doesn't support NTFS, unless you'll use some additional program
(like NTFSDOS).
Using such util you can built bootable cdr with NTFS support.

However, I think it's good idea to have small (~2Gb) partition for pure system only (It can be NTFS).
If for some reason you can't boot system, just run XP setup from CD
(then you can try repair, or just format your system partition and install clean XP - no data will be lost) : personally I like this approach (just don't forget to keep all important data in other partitions (email and such)).

 

[ACE101]

Ok. My motherboards can all boot from my CD-rom drives, so that issue is resolved.

I already have Partition Magic 7.0 Pro, so I'm going to try it out and see how it does. I'm not going to use the conversion utility to convert from FAT32 to NTFS, and instead will copy the contents of my two partitions on that machine over to my wifes machine, and format the disk from scratch. We both have 120 GB disks and only around 40 gigs used. So I'll just back up all files onto the other machine so that I can retrieve them as necessary (such as word documents, address books, etc). I sure wish they had an import utility so that I could perform a fresh install and import applications over, however I know that's just a dream.

Ron

 

[bsobel]

> To defrag the swap file you need Diskeeper by Executive Software, this will defrag the swap file before you boot into Windows. You can't defrag the swap file while Windows is running

Norton Speed Disk defrags the swap file and mft on a live system.
Bill