Fat 32

Jolly_Roger

Guys,
Thanks for all the advice. I cannot really do any of it until this evening, when I have finished work. In the meantime, would any of the following observations help? Up until recently, I was able to use Dragon quite happily. Now, if I try to use it in combination with Word, the computer automatically shuts down, complaining of a FAT 32 problem. As part of the boot up, it undertakes a disk scan, finds nothing wrong and off we go. If I again use Dragon/Word, down we go again! Dragon clearly uses a lot of memory, being a voice recognition software. Yesterday, I was told that my user identity on Dragon was using too large a vocabularly, so I had to create another user file, which quite happily used the large vocabularly option!! Except then the whole thing crashed...
I was also horrified this morning to find that all the "Sent" items in Outlook Express had simply disappeared as had all the deleted files in the Recycle Bin, although no other information has gone (I hope!)
I had once instance recently of Word having to delete a corrupted normal.dot file. If I leave a Word document open on the computer, go away for an hour and come back, the computer will have shut down, again because of FAT 32 problems.
Norton cannot live update, despite having been uninstalled and reloaded. I have a similar XP set up on my laptop (which has a slower processor), where Norton does everything you ask it to.

wolfman

Hmmm, do a drive fitness test first. All hard drive manufacturers usually supply this.

It doesn't sound like anything physically wrong with the drive though. It may be a controller or driver issue. Something isn't writing to the drive correctly. Updating your BIOS and drivers could help fix that.

Also, it could be a virus. You never know. Worth running a scan just incase. It does sound like something fail to write to the disk though. You mentioned leaving Word on and coming back and it'd be off. Word autosaves every so often which probably caused the problem.

If none of the above works, then yeah, try converting to NTFS. It's an option worth trying. Also, note FAT32 isn't necessarily faster than NTFS, although usually that is the case. FAT32 can access files faster, but NTFS reduces the number of disk accesses and time needed to find a file.

bbb_uk

You say it shuts down complaining of FAT32 problem! What exactly is the error and is before XP shuts itself down or is it just when it starts up again?

If it complains of FAT32 problems before XP is shut down then thats a different matter but if its only when it starts up and then proceeds to check the disk then it's because Windows wasn't shut down properly possibly because it was having problems unloading a driver/software.

Another problem could be the Pagefile needs clearing/deleting as I have read on an M$ article that every now and again pagefile gets corrupt. The pagefile is used by FAT32 and NTFS. Do you know how to delete the pagefile?

Also Mr Stint, I agree FAT32 is stone age but I've been using computers since the days of MSDOS (well before Windows was even thought of) so that's probably why I prefer FAT32 besides the obvious fact that it is faster than NTFS.

One last thing the only problem (it's actually its only major limitation) with FAT32 is that no one file can be bigger than 4GB. Now 4GB is a very, very, large file and I've yet to come across one file that large with the exception of video capturing from a camcorder or other source as if they capture in .avi format those files can be really big but then I get an error saying that it can't save the file as its bigger than 4GB.

bbb_uk

I still where possible use the old shortcut commands for everything even those from the days of WordPerfect where the likes of Ctrl P came from. Word just copied it.

Jolly_Roger

bbb_
How do I go about deleting pagefile? Please talk me through this. Will it recreate itself during a reboot? Is it necessary for the running of the computer?

wolfman

I'd go with NTFS in you can convert the file system. Reasons being:

- It's more efficient in terms of space usage.

- FAT32 isn't always faster. It is faster on smaller volumes (generally less than 20gb), whereas you'll find NTFS is generally faster on larger volumes. As I said before FAT32 can access files more quickly, but it isn't as fast searching through files when compared with NTFS due to the way files are indexed.

- NTFS is much more recoverable as it keeps track of changes made to the file system. This means it can effectively roll back any changes you made. FAT32 just uses pointers.

- Greater security.

- It is prone to defragmenting, but less so than FAT32


The only time I would consider FAT32 would be:

- A dual boot system, such as Linux. It's a pain not only mouting, but writing to an NTFS drive (I use Fedora).

bbb_uk

wolfman wrote:

FAT32 isn't always faster. It is faster on smaller volumes (generally less than 20gb), whereas you'll find NTFS is generally faster on larger volumes.

I have a 160GB SATA drive (partioned as 100GB FAT32, the other 60 as NTFS). My main drive (WinXP runs from) is the 100GB. I gave it a go and converted to NTFS and found that it was slower and I had great problems deframenting it as it would never properly do it. I therefore moved back to FAT32. I use diskeeper to defrag my drives and found it does a better job of FAT32 than it does of my other (60GB) NTFS drive.

NTFS is much more recoverable as it keeps track of changes made to the file system. This means it can effectively roll back any changes you made. FAT32 just uses pointers.

True, but if the computer goes belly-up (is that even a proper word?), I can by booting into DOS access my FAT32 drive to copy over important/personal files to floppy or something. It isn't possible to do this on an NTFS system unless using a NTFS driver type thing to access it via DOS.

I personally can't see FAT32 being the problem as described by Jolly_Roger as apart from the fact he's been using it for over year without incident and only recently as this problem began. It does point to the fact that a driver/software isn't properly unloaded by XP during its shutdown stage and upon rebooting, XP realises there was a problem and checks the disk for lost fragments*. The only time I can see FAT32 being the problem is if when he uses Dragon it is trying to save to a file that is greater than 4GB (the limit of FAT32).

* WinXP only ever does a quick check of the disc (especially during boot-up) unless specifically asked to do a full scan by us before hand.

At the end of the day it comes down to personal preference. I personally, find FAT32 is faster and I know should something happen where windows refuses to load at all, I can easily get at my personal files.

wolfman

bbb_uk wrote:

True, but if the computer goes belly-up (is that even a proper word?), I can by booting into DOS access my FAT32 drive to copy over important/personal files to floppy or something. It isn't possible to do this on an NTFS system unless using a NTFS driver type thing to access it via DOS.

Try Knoppix. A live version of Linux (runs from cd). Brilliant if you want to recover files (even NTFS but you have to manually mount the drives), and can still do so using an operating system. Agreed though, NTFS is harder to work with in such situations.

Everyone is entitled to their own preference. I agree though, I don't think it's something to do with the file system. I purely suggested it as an option as it's what Microsoft advise you to use, and is the native file system of Windows XP.

bbb_uk

wolfman wrote:

Try Knoppix. A live version of Linux (runs from cd). Brilliant if you want to recover files (even NTFS but you have to manually mount the drives), and can still do so using an operating system.

Thanks. I'll remember that for those people I fix computers for that have NTFS and windows refuses to load. I personally don't need it with using FAT32 and I don't keep important files on my NTFS partition as it's primarily used for capturing video from my camcorder. I use M$ moviemaker and capture at the best possible quality which is .avi (uncompressed) so as you can imagine I have very huge (well in excess of 4GB) video files. I then proceed to transfer the .avi to DVD quality MPEG2 format using TMPGEnc Plus.