C:\win98 is FAT32 - as it was before. D:\W2K formatted to NTFS.

I read JoeP's post about his HDD clicking, but my situation is a bit different. I'm not convinced that the hdd is dying on me but I'd like to get some opinions.

When i boot up to the W2K partition, there is definitely a noticeable rapid-firing clicking sound coming from the HDD as it boots - particularly as it gets to the DOS splash screen with the blue progress bar. Now the strange thing is that, it never did this before (FAT32) the reformat and I don't have the clicking sound when I boot up to the Win98 partition.

I fail to see how changing it to NTFS could have started this but then again, i don't know much about file systems and how they actually work on a microscopic level.

I could reformat my W2K partition back to FAT32 and see if the problem goes away but I changed it to NTFS because i have heard Win2K and XP tend to run smoother on a NTFS partition.

EDIT: The HDD is the original HDD that came with it (Dell Dimensions system) about 2.5 years old. 40 GB/7200 rpm. 9 partitions.

My respectful suggestion is that if you hear Anything coming out of your harddrive that you haven't heard before, you best beat it to the punch and replace it before it gives you a royal wedgie in your data. The read/write heads just move in n'out, and the disk spins. That's it. Data, formatting or file systems make no difference - it's just binary 0s and 1s no matter what we humans call it.

AMD Quad 3.0/Oclocked to 3.7 stable.
ECO-R120 Water Cooled System
4 Gig pc1066 DDR2 RAM
Asrock mobo
Dual SATA DVDs with Lightscribe
Dual SATA 1_TB HDs
Windows 8 Pro/Windows 7 Ult

What kind of drive is it? Western Digital or Maxtor? If you don't know, download Aida32 from http://www.aida32.hu/aida32.php and get the manufacturer name. Then you can download a drive test program from their site.

Agree on the test program.

Just today had a system start acting flaky. I'd open a directory & it would open, but the hour glass would hang around - too long for it to be normal. And at sporatic times the system would just lock up.

Did normal stuff - scandisk; clean, antivirus; clean, msconfig; clean, ad-aware; clean, then I did full scandisk checking each cluster; also clean.

Downloaded (Seagate specific) test program, & it tells me the drive is bad.

--------------------------------------
BANK OF AMERICA.COM ONLINE BANKING SUCKS IN THE HUGEST WAY IMAGINABLE

Newegg.com's new image gallery layout sucks in the hugest way imaginable too !
And now they're using JavaScript to "turn" pages to boot ! SUCKS

It's a Western Digital HDD and i took your suggestion and downloaded the diagnostics utility program from Western's website.

The test results show negative. Not one single error. Actually, I'm really pleased with this HDD, and really don't have strong reason to think it's going to crap out on me.

I've done so many clean installs and resized partitions (with PM6.0) on this HDD that it really has proven to me it can take a 'beating and keep on licking'.

At this point, I'm tempted to reformat and go back to FAT32 on this partition. I was about to say i'm a bit dissappointed in that I don't see a noticeable improvement in speed & stability of my OS but then again - it might be too soon to judge that. I might install everything (all proggies & games) like i had before and assess the situation.

Has anyone here reformatted a drive from FAT32 to NTFS? And if so, what was your assessment?

Has anyone here converted from FAT32 to NTFS on a W2K operating system? And if so, what was your assessment?

If you ran the convert program, you will get a slower system as the program converts to a 512K cluster size while a clean install will format as 4096K ckuster size. I ran the convert program one time so I can attest to the slow down.

Negative Sonny, i reinstalled the OS and let W2K Setup format it as NTFS (as you suggested in a previous thread of mine) and really don't see any slow down or 'sluggishness'.

I never really saw a slow down even when i had it as FAT32. The only real annoyance was some of the icon colors in my quick launch bar were fubarred after i installed a icon changer proggie and even after i uninstalled said software the icons remained a bit off. Of course that's not the only reason why i decided to go with NTFS this time around but i just thought being an NTFS newbie, i'd notice an overall improvement in system speed & stability. In that regard, i had to admit, i should use the operating system over a period of time and see if I notice any problems. Thanks for the feedback though.

EDIT:

Re-reading my previous post, i can see why you thought i had 'converted' the partition. My choice of bad wording there.

You will not see any speed increase with NTFS, in fact on a slower computer you may find it slightly slower than FAT32. The advantages of NTFS are better security, and better stability, less chance of crashing the system. It also does not suffer from the wasted slack space caused by the clusters getting bigger on large partitions.

Shelly

OK. Actually there is no real speed gain with NTFS on similar sized smaller partitions. Once FAT32 gets larger does NTFS show some increase in speed and that's only because NTFS handles larger partitons more efficiantly. For example, if you ahd a 40GB drive with FAT32 two 20GB partitions, the cluster size will be extremely ineficient and would run slower. Also, with FAT32, you have more of a chance of lost and cross-linked clusters which could increase the chance of lost data.

Good read:
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/home/using/productdoc/en/default.asp?url=/windowsxp/home/using/productdoc/en/choosing_between_NTFS_FAT_and_FAT32.asp

I have only run FAT32 on my W2K machine & have never had a problem with speed or stability.



I started dabling with another machine with XP & NTFS. My initial impression is that NTFS has more "overhead" & does not run as cleanly as my W2K machine - though this could be because of the #%^& that came pre-installed on the system.

At some point, I'm going to reformat & do a clean install of XP. Probably even try it twice - once with FAT32 & once with NTFS.

While I'm sure NTFS has its merrits, it just scares me.


(My thoughts on NTFS & I'm sure are not typical).
The lack of an "easy" & "understandable" interface for things that are a bit out of the norm. Like security and permissions & booting off a floppy & ?

Red, Blue, Black. My brother asks me why some files (in windows explorer) are red, some blue, and others black. I say, yeah red means something - but don't remember what. Then I find that blue files are compressed. How, why, who, would compress an .JPG or .MP3?

Then there's that System Volume Information directory. I want to see what's in there & it won't let me! I log in as Administrator & it still won't! There was a post here that the Admin is (not by default) allowed access to some (possibly it was other users) accounts. To my way of thinking that makes no sense what so ever. If I'm Admin, I want access to everything, no questions asked, for better or worse.

Another brother (XP & NTFS) & I'm coping data files from one machine to another over a network. And again I can't access some of the directories. Drove me crazy - file protection.

I guess my main problem with NTFS is the lack of and or my lack of knowledge of the utilities to manipulate it correctly. How do I find out who "owns" a directory. Can a DIR tell me - no. Oh, I go to a particular directory & right click it & some such. Under unix, I type ls -l, and there it is right in front of me. Log in as root and I'd have access no questions asked.

Then there's my fear, what if I can't boot. With FAT, I can boot off a floppy & possibly (probably) have access to my files. With NTFS, I cannot without 3rd party tools (like Sysinternal's ntfsdospro). Recovery console (fixboot/fixmbr & all that) is beyond me at this point.



So why is your drive clicking under NTFS? Would not think that NTFS whould have any bearing.

--------------------------------------
BANK OF AMERICA.COM ONLINE BANKING SUCKS IN THE HUGEST WAY IMAGINABLE

Newegg.com's new image gallery layout sucks in the hugest way imaginable too !
And now they're using JavaScript to "turn" pages to boot ! SUCKS

MP3 and jpg files are always compressd files. That is their reason for existing, they take up less space than other formats.

Shelly

Just my point. Then why were they being stored "compressed".

--------------------------------------
BANK OF AMERICA.COM ONLINE BANKING SUCKS IN THE HUGEST WAY IMAGINABLE

Newegg.com's new image gallery layout sucks in the hugest way imaginable too !
And now they're using JavaScript to "turn" pages to boot ! SUCKS