NT verses Win98 Hard Drive Formatting

[Todd1]

I've been using Win98, but now have a machine with removable drives and I'll be alternating between Win98 and NT4. I have a Promise Fasttrak 100 which I need to format but I was told that NT and Win98 have different Hard Drive formats and I will not be able to use the same Promise Fasttrak 100 with both operating systems. Is this true?

[wkulecz]

Yes windows 9x supports fat, fat16 & fat32

NT supports fat16 and NTFS.

Fat16 is no good since 2GB is its maximum partition size.

NTFS is good but won't work on win9x unless you by 3rd party NTFS drivers for win9x

If you upgrade NT to w2k you can use fat32 but are still stuck with the 4GB file size limit. NTFS removes this limit.

There is a "glitch" in NTFS. Typical Microsoft. NT4 NTFS works fine with w2k, But W2K formated NTFS is not backward compatible with NT4 -- or so I've been told. I can verify that w2k has no trouble with NT4 formated NTFS partitions. But I've never tried the otherway around.

--wally.

[Todd1]

Wally,

Thanks for the info!

I'll look into 3rd party NTFS drivers for win9x because I can not upgrade to
w2k.

Todd

[AlgoRhythm]

From what I've read (I haven't tried it), NT4 with SP6 should be able to read the new NTFS from Win2K...

AlgoRhythm

[Michel Carleer]

Remember that if W98 can read NTFS partitions with third party drivers, it still cannot read or write files larger than 4GB.
Michka

[Eric VanHeest]

From personal experience, installing Win2000 on an NT4 machine will putz with any NTFS drives that you have such that NT4 will no longer be able to do a disk check on those drives. As long as you still have a moderately functioning 2000 installation, this isn't a big issue, as every once in a while, you can use 2000 to do a disk check instead of NT4, but if you're like me and decide to "try" Win2000, don't like it, and delete it, you get stuck with an uncheckable drive.