I needed to convert a FAT32 drive to NTFS today and as it was 500GB I wasn’t sure how easy it might be. I contemplated backing it all up then formatting it, but then I found out you can do it on a live drive.
Backups are always recommended – I made an educated decision not to on this occasion but if it had of gone wrong I would have lost over 400GB of files.
Below is the output from command prompt. In Windows 7 I searched for CMD and ran it as an admin to do the below. E was the drive I was working on and the command is;
convert e: /fs:ntfs
Microsoft Windows [Version 6.1.7601] Copyright (c) 2009 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.
C:\Users\Kev>convert e: /fs:ntfs The type of the file system is FAT32. Enter current volume label for drive E: LOCAL STORE Volume LOCAL STORE created 01/05/2011 19:16 Volume Serial Number is 8BA5-BE5E Windows is verifying files and folders... File and folder verification is complete. Windows has checked the file system and found no problems. 488,256,704 KB total disk space. 1,085,472 KB in 534 hidden files. 181,248 KB in 5,590 folders. 415,408,448 KB in 102,391 files. 71,581,504 KB are available.
32,768 bytes in each allocation unit. 15,258,022 total allocation units on disk. 2,236,922 allocation units available on disk.
Determining disk space required for file system conversion... Total disk space: 488375968 KB Free space on volume: 71581504 KB Space required for conversion: 808979 KB Converting file system Conversion complete
C:\Users\Kev>
NT4 rocks……