Quick post... benefit of FAT32 partitions

So a friend asked me to take a look at his new work PC since it was mysteriously opening lots of browser windows... a quick look revealed a TON of viruses (at least 15) and spyware (not sure how much, adaware found 324 items but that includes the junk like history that Adaware seems to count as critical, but it definately included other things that are really spyware).

Anyway, unfortunately cleaning these seems to be next to impossible... if I could boot to dos and run a virus checker and get rid of the viruses to start it might be nice, however the machine has been converted to NTFS, which means dos can't even seen the drive...

This is another reason I like to keep at least my main drive as FAT32.

 

FAT32 is horribly insecure, though. It cannot enforce any permissions, so viruses can spread even if you're running as a normal user. Most virus checkers don't run under DOS anymore anyway.
FAT32 is also horribly inefficient in it's use of storage space. It's alright for smaller volumes, but when you get over 1-2GB, it's just bad mojo. Non-journaled transactions, bad cluster allocation, etc.
NTFS is actually accessible if you license out the NTFS development kit from Microsoft. Many software packages do this if they want low-level access to the filesystem to do what you're saying, or things like Partition Magic which edit NTFS partitions and so on.
Keeping your filesystem as FAT32 is pretty much a bad idea any way you look at it. DOS should be dead. It can't handle modern hardware, it can't handle modern software.

What you should do (since after a machine is infected, you can never really know that it's clean), is take a Linux boot disk, copy off the information from the drive that's crucial, then nuke and pave the drive. Use NTFS, have your friend run as a normal user for most tasks, and call it good.

 

Yea I want to have one nt partition instead of the two fat 32s the acer puts on stock, does anyone know why they do this? its really stupid and a pita.

 

I guess I still think of DOS as being a lot better than windows, because while windows is pretty and all, it's so buggy and full of potential issues, and basically the answer to most real problems is "save your data and re-install" which isn't a good answer IMHO.

Devon, the reason I suspect that Acer do the two FAT32's is because Norton GHOST (or similar) works better with FAT32 than NTFS (although I'm having no problems with using NTFS) and because worst case they can still boot to DOS and see the drive, where with NTFS if you can't boot windows, you can't do much.

 

I was surprised to find my drive formatted as FAT32, but I'm not changing it. I don't think it matters much for a home user. In fact, I think FAT32 is easier to deal with if I ever run into problems, because booting with a DOS disk allows you full access with existing utilities at no extra expense.

 

first off the virtual dos is still very useful. I still use it as a sys admin on a daily basis. But I agree fat32 is not a good thing for anything but your small thumbdrive.

If you can get into windows convert the drive to fat32 using computer managment and then use acer recovery and start from scratch. Never use fat32 unless you have application you need that only run on fat32, otherwise it is terribly inefficient.

 

If your friend were to use FireFox, stop running apps from unknown sources, he would not have all these problem to start with. NTFS prevents access from DOS for obvious security purposes. Its like complaining that booting to DOS, one cannot easily access a linux partition!

I've encountered friends who had tons of spyware, and its not a problem to run regedit, and remove the culprit apps. You may want to try that instead.

 

do you guys think that a brand new ntfs partition is better than one converted from fat32?

 

Sir Punk: I don't think it really matters either way...

 

Brand new NTFS is generally better (if you are to use NTFS) due to the cluster size being set appropriately (as I understand it) however depending on what you have access to that can be quite hard to achieve (lack of windows install disks with new computers)

 

actually you know what, I just tried to boot from the XP home it came with my asus and...it's not the usual XP installation process, it just makes me choose if I want to create 2 partitions or just one and that's it. even if I get to the prompt the cd has only 3 EXE and none of those does anything useful.

so I'm stuck, I want just to reinstall everything with NTFS, but I can't.

unless I get a win XP pro, but through my University I can get only a Pro upgrade with SP 2, but I don't think I can boot from that cd and install it.

suggestions?