NTFS5's new features appeal to Win2K users
I've had a love-hate relationship with NTFS since the Windows NT 3.1 days. Back then, Microsoft hyped NTFS as the ultimate file system—ultrareliable, secure, and capable of supporting disks of almost unlimited size. In addition, NTFS was the first Microsoft file system to offer long filename support.
However, NTFS didn't live up to the hype, especially for desktop users. NTFS's reliability and security features benefitted mainly network servers, not desktops. Moreover, if you formatted your hard disk with NTFS and your system later developed a problem, few tools were available to find or fix the problem. When Windows 95 came out, long filename support became available in the DOS-compatible FAT16 file system. With FAT16, you could reboot your system from a DOS disk and use DOS tools to troubleshoot the hard disk.
Through the years, NTFS has gained a few additional features—notably compression—but for many NT desktop users, FAT16 is a simpler and faster way to go. However, in Windows 2000, Microsoft seems determined to make NTFS 5.0 (NTFS5) the default file system for server and desktop systems.
Win2K and NTFS5
Win2K's documentation makes clear Microsoft's determination to use NTFS5 as the default file system for Win2K, stating that Microsoft includes FAT16 in Win2K only to support upgrades from legacy OSs. Win2K includes support for the more sophisticated FAT32 file system that Win95 OEM Service Release (OSR) 2.0 and later uses, but if you install Win2K from scratch, you'll get NTFS partitions by default. If you upgrade a system that has FAT16 partitions, Win2K Setup will offer to convert them to NTFS.
NTFS5 is different from NTFS 4.0, so users who dual-boot between Win2K and NT 4.0 need to apply Service Pack 4 (SP4) or later; otherwise, NT 4.0 can't read the new disk format. NTFS5 includes revisions to fix bugs that appeared in earlier NTFS versions, and it offers two significant new features: encryption and disk quotas. (For more information about NTFS5, see Sean Daily, "NTSF5 vs. FAT32," April 2000.)
Converting to NTFS from FAT
Although you can automatically convert a volume to NTFS during Win2K Setup, manually converting to NTFS from a FAT16 or FAT32 partition requires you to use the Convert command-line function. Convert's syntax is
convert x: /fs:ntfs /v
where x is the drive or partition you want to convert from FAT to NTFS. The /v option specifies a verbose mode in which Win2K will present you with informative messages about each step of the conversion process.
If you attempt to run Convert on the partition on which you've installed the Win2K system files, Win2K displays the following message: Convert cannot gain exclusive access to the C: drive so it cannot convert it now. Would you like to schedule it to be converted the next time the system restarts [Y/N]? If you type Y, the system will automatically convert the drive's FAT files to NTFS after the next reboot. The conversion took less than 10 minutes on a Dell Latitude CPi notebook with a 300MHz Pentium II processor, 128MB of RAM, and a 2GB hard disk containing more than 17,000 files.