ntfs->fat32
 

hi every body
i have a problem
i want to changa a windows drive (ntfs) to fat32 from my slackware
without losing the files on the ntfs drive
i know that i can make this with partion magic
but i want to make it on my little slack
any suggestions?

converting two proprietary file systems based on reversed engineernig of protocols, if you would trust that, you're nuts, and i'm pretty sure it's also totally impossible within linux anyway, as it should be.

I am not sure it is possible from anywhere to change the filesystem while preserving all the data.

Please tell us why you want to do this. There might be a better way to get to the final goal. (In American slang: What swamp are you trying to drain?)

It is possible, but you need to do it from Windows using
an app like Partition Magic. I've done fat32->ntfs that way
on an empty, brand new USB drive.

If going the opposite way, remember that fat32 has various
restrictions that ntfs doesn't have. For example,
there's a file size limit on fat32 (2Gb or 4Gb, can't remember which?).

A better approach would be to create a fat32 partition and then copy
files from your existing ntfs partition. I don't know if that
can be done from linux.

Good luck!

Andrew

Another thing worth mentioning is the size limit of fat32 itself. One fat32 partition cant be larger then 32GB. And that isn't very much these days. So if your NTFS partition is larger then 32GB it will be impossible with linux, windows, <insert os/application here>.

That isn't true.

If you create the fat32 partition in linux, you won't have any problems. If you try to create it in Windows, then you might have problems (I've run into this before).

yeah, FAT32 limits the size of 1 FILE to 4gb .. so you can't keep all your 9gb dvd images in that drive.

Why do you want to convert ? Is space such a big issue? Copy it to a external drive (beg/borrow/steal from your friends) , and run mkfs.ntfs on that partition. That should be enough .

Ops, my bad. I just remembered that is was a case back in the days when I used windows. That was before XP, and I used NT 4.0 until i changed, so I wasn't aware of that fix.

Thanks for pointing it out :)

By far your best bet is to copy the stuff you want to save to a different drive or partition and format that NTFS drive and start fresh.

My guess is that the op wants to setup a shared drive to be used with windows. If this is the case I would recommend using an ext3 partition and get the (open source) ext3 driver for windows.

If the OP really just wants a shared drive I would instead recommend NTFS-3G. It works wonderfully. The only snag is that you need to make sure that Higher level folders on the partition have permissions set in Windows and that they will be inherited. This is because NTFS-3G doesn't do perms correctly. In Linux they are set as you set them for the partition, but in Windows new files and folders will by default be open for everyone. If you create a top level directory in Linux it is easy to fix the perms in [Edit] Windows later. If you use Linux mostly and care what Windows can access then this is the best way to go. If you use Windows mostly and don't care that it can touch your linux files then the ext3 driver would be the way to go.

Back to the original question, I don't think you can easily convert from NTFS to Fat32 directly in Linux. However, if you don't have partition magic and have a mostly empty NTFS partition you could use gparted (in Slackware if you want) to:

1) shrink the NTFS partition
2) create a fat32 partition with the new extra space (must be > size of data)
3) copy over the files from the NTFS partition to the fat32 partition
4) delete the NTFS partition
5) expand the FAT32 partition to reclaim the space you want

If I were to do this I would just use the gparted live cd, but you can use gparted in Slackware, so there you go.

Thanks shadowsnipes.

Now I have one less reason to have to reboot into windows :)

Closed source file system with a reverse engineered driver.

If you use ext3 you get an open FS with an open source driver.

Just something to think about... I'm assuming the OP was looking for a shared data drive, but who knows...

Using Linux file system drivers brings its own limitations. Good luck finding them for Windows XP64. Maybe ext2 but that's about it. I've been using ntfs-3g for over a year because it's the only option I have to access my xfs partitions. And it's not just XP64, similar limitations apply to Solaris and FreeBSD. FAT - and possibly ext2 - are the only failsafe options. I wish I had known that before as wiping and redoing several hundreds of gigabytes of data is not something that makes me go wild with enthusiasm.

i want to change the ntfs driver to fat32 so i make a share partition between my ntfs drivers of windows and linux
coz linux don't write to ntfs
:)