Random Synapses

I was a fan of FAT32, the file system introduced by Windows 95. Windows NT and then Windows 2000 and XP brought the NTFS file system, which is more robust and secure, but I did not embrace it for a single reason: how could I retrieve my data in case of a crash?

With FAT32, it’s easy - just pop in a Windows 98 boot disk with SCANDISK and a few other command-line tools, and power up the computer. You can fix the partitions and get your data back easily. There are other free tools which can help diagnose and fix a hard drive. And I was recently put in the situation to perform such data recovery tasks, when a power failure (assumed, the actual source of problem is still not clear) messed up my dad’s hard drive. Entire applications disappeared, data was corrupted, but Windows was still running ok-ish. After a few attempts to find out what was wrong, using Windows 2000’s built-in diagnostics, the hard drive crashed completely and I was unable to boot or read it at all, not even by moving it in another computer as secondary drive. Luckily for me, I had in my toolkit the “magic” boot disk, popped it in, ran SCANDISK at the command prompt, and voila - fixed. Errors were found deeper than I imagined: partition tables were messed, the two file allocation tables did not match, clusters were lost, but as the drive was using FAT32 I could repair them automatically with SCANDISK and dad’s personal files and e-mails were restored. (Message to the little voice in my head screaming “You should backup personal files more often!”: piss off.)

But I was suspecting that other Windows files were also corrupt or missing, so I decided to repartition the drive and reinstall Windows 2000 - this time, using the NTFS file system. It is more secure, more reliable, allows larger files, doesn’t waste clusters, and will prevent such crashes in the future. Or at least, it should. I still have the fear of a corrupt file system, when the Windows 98 boot disk will be useless since it can’t read NTFS. I need to research new drive tools, new ways to access failing drives, proper ways to fix problems. For now, let’s just hope that the new file system will be as robust as expected and the possibility of another crash will be much smaller than with FAT32.

So, I have converted the primary partitions of all my computers to NTFS, and Windows is happy. Can’t tell if it’s happier or just happy, but I did notice that I didn’t need to defragment the drives as often as before. And today I will take the next step and ditch FAT32 completely on my own computer - the drive is preparing for converting all other partitions to NTFS as I’m typing this. Keep fingers crossed.

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 14th, 2004 at 2:42 pm and is filed under General, PC stuff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.