URGENT HELP-W3J Fat32 problems

After a long period of trying to decide whether or not to convert to NFTS, i finally decided to stick with Fat32 as it wasn't really causing any problems and I did not want 512kb clusters.

About a month ago I noticed that the Bluetooth on my W3J was not turned on as it usually was on startup. However this didn't really bother me and so I thought nothing of it. I don't know if this is related to the problem?

However a couple of nights ago, when trying to shut the system down, it locked up on the blue "Windows is shutting down" screen. I left it for about 10minutes but nothing happened and so I was forced to hold the on button in for 5 seconds.

On the next startup, I got the Fat32 consistency check which took ages btw! I've scanned with Adaware, Spybot and Avast is running, and none of them seem to have found anything, which I guess is good but also slightly annoying as I don;t know what is causing these problems.

I need to get this problem sorted before I go to uni next Thursday as I don't really want to be stuck their with no real transport and a laptop that doesn't work properly or is unreliable. My W3J is fitted with a 100gb 7200rpm Hitachi Travelstar and so I don't really want to have to convert to NTFS and have 512kb clusters as this kind of defeats the object of having a 7200rom HDD.

Please, please, please can someone help me out/ advise me what to do.

Cheers

 

Have you done a system scan, and defragmented the drive?

Perhaps that will help.

 

I'll try defragmenting, never done it before!

And a system scan using what exactly?

Thanks again

 

Welcome to the problems with FAT32. What makes you think that NTFS would have 512kB clusters? NTFS is usually 4k or so. I would defragment your disk, and then run "convert /FS:NTFS C:" on a command line.

For more info, look here, specifically the line "The default cluster size for NTFS is smaller than the default for FAT on similarly sized volumes."

 

Cool, but I'm fairly certain that if you use the windows prompt to to convert to NTFS then you do end up with 512kb clusters,

The only way to get round it is to re-format which I don't really want to do.

 

I quote:

Straight from the horse's mouth

 

O.k then, so you're saying I would end up with 4kb clusters if I used to command prompt. Cheers, but I don't really want to convert at the moment.

I just tried to defragment but said that it could not continue because there is a corruption in "C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\DRIVERS\DISDN". This sounds bad and I've heard that this type of problem along with trying to defrag can totally ruin a HDD.

Any ideas peeps, really need this sorted.

 

Corruption? Do a FULL scan of your C: with chkdsk, and let it fix all the errors it can. Then defragment. Then convert. Seriously, FAT32 is just bad. NTFS has journaling and is just a much better filesystem in general. I realize you may not believe it, or someone else is giving you bad advice, but please believe me. You want to be on it if at all possible. These errors are almost certainly related to your filesystem being unreliable. You should also check the SMART status of the disk, and see if you notice any problems. Not sure how you do it in Windows, as I have Linux I check it under usually.

 

I got a cheap copy of partition magic and converted the clusters to the appropriate size after I realized they weren't right when I used the convert command. I'm not sure you should convert before figuring out what's going on now, but once you do, just use partition magic and then you won't have to worry about it.

I used it to combine partitions too.

Krista

 

When I did it on my sister's Acer, one of the partitions converted to 4k clusters, the other didn't. I used partiton magic to change the cluster size and then combine the two partitions. No problems. I didn't have to go and reformat.

Krista

 

OK, clarification: If you convert the Windows partition directly, you will get 512 KB clusters. That is because some of the files are not aligned in such a way that they can be included in 4M clusters.

However: you can do an extra easy step, aligning the files with BootItNG (only on the Windows partition, the rest are OK). You can ensure like this that the system partition will also get 4MB clusters. See here: http://www.aumha.org/win5/a/ntfscvt.php for how to do that.

On a sidenote, the performance impact of having 4MB instead of 512KB clusters is not so tremendous. I've run with both and I have failed to really notice it.

But back to the original issue:

Why should this be apriori connected to filesystem errors? :-?? And why would you still believe that it's that after you did a full scan and no errors were reported? I'd say it can be a number of things, e.g., (more likely) registry is somehow bad due to new drivers/software installation.

Question: after you scanned, did Windows lockup on the next shutdown? If not, then there's nothing to fix! If yes:

What to do: try rolling back using system restore to a restore point sometime before the problems occurred. Alternatively, try removing newer drivers that might have caused problems (more work like this though).

 

Hi again, after running the disk scan upon start-up and then defragmenting, the problem seems to have gone and the system starts up as normal.

I don't think I will convert to NTFS at the moment as it looks like the whole process (using BootItNG) is gonna take a fairly long time, what with having to defrag yet again.

However I may convert in the future using BootItNG and was just wondering if I can use a C.D to make the 'bootable disk' rather than a floppy?

I asked this in another thread but didn't really get a straight forward answer; If I do choose to convert using simply the command prompt and end up with 512kb clusters what will actually be slower?

Cheers again

 

Then there's nothing to fix. Freezes during shutdown happen sometimes, especially if the Windows has become somewhat bloated with software.

It doesn't really take too much time, as I don't think the disk will end up too fragmented if you already defrag-ed (I might be wrong thogh). File alignment, I estimate it takes up to half an hour if you have on the order of 10 GB on the OS partition, I would estimate. On a fresh Windows +drivers installation, it took just around 10 minutes in my case.

Sure. When you run BootItNG you have the option to make a bootable ISO instead of writing a floppy.

Well, theoretically everything that involves HDD transfers. As you have 8 times smaller clusters (assuming 512 vs. 4096), to read/write the same file size you need to read/write 8 times more clusters. However, as I said, the difference in perceived performance is not outstanding.

Nevertheless, given that you didn't convert yet, why not burn a RW CD with the BootitNG ISO, align, and convert? I'm sure you'd be done in an hour.

Hope this helps.

Edit: disclaimers: the time values given above are just guesses, don't rely on them with your life.

 

OK, I just realized something (it doesn't have bearing on the stuff I said above), I made an error in stating the sizes of the clusters.

They are not 512 KB and 4 MB, but 512 bytes and 4 KB. It figures. 4 MB would be rather large as a basic unit of disk space...

 

Thanks for all the help E.B.E.

You say it should take about an hour, but most people suggest that I make a back-up of everything on the dirve(s) I'm about to convert. Bearing in mind that I've got about 9GB of music on ITunes and my C drive totals about 19GB of data, I can see this taking a fairly long time.

Knowing this, do you still think converting would be worthwile?

I'm starting to wish I'd converted straight away, and am considering doing the conversion without backing up.

 

yeah its worth it for sure.... the few hours it takes you to get ur PC going in NTFS could save you lots of heart ache down the road....

NTFS > FAT32 for nearly everything except benchmarking apparentally.

there are a lot of threads on this topic if you search the asus forums..


Insane

 

I never had any essential data on non-NTFS partitions (I keep my OS and programs separate from the data) so I never needed to do any backups before conversions. If you have essential data on the partitions that you want to convert, and want to be 100% protected from data loss, you should backup before alignment/conversion...

On the other hand, I never had any problems with the conversion, i.e. the filesystem wasn't damaged. But I cannot guarantee that it won't happen

To optimize the time for conversion (remember you only need to realign the C drive):
How about moving all the data from C to some other partition? E.g. your music files. If I understand correctly you have 9GB of music files. That means you can cut the amount of disk data to realign to half. If you have other sorts of data (e.g. in my documents, my images, etc.), even more. Leave only the windows, programs, and system data files (like those in documents and settings). That should speed up the process.

 

Sorted, I didn't even think about moving the files to the other partition. If I do this then I should just be left with all the O.S/Program files on the C drive?

But what happens if something goes wrong and these files are affected, surely that would mean a fresh install of XP is required?

Assuming everything goes to plan with the conversion of the C partition, will I just need to repeat the same steps to convert the other partition (D) to NTFS?

Once again, I can't thank you guys, especially E.B.E enough for your input. I hope you all understand that this is quite a daunting thing to do for a novice.

 

You can move all your personal files to other partition, but you cannot move the system files and program files. Normally, Microsoft's setting for saving the data is in "My document" folder, might be you also have another foler created sush as "Downloard file" and so on.
If a system file corrupt or crash, the OS normally need to be reinstall, but if you have a backup or an image file for the system, you don't need to install the OS again. Similarly, if an application file is missing or corrupt, to reinstall it will be recover to back to normal.
The same way in the same step also work fine to convert the other partition, just like this: convert d: /fs:ntfs
Cheers

 

Just converted my C drive and everything seems to have worked a treat. Used chkdsk c: and found I have 4KB cluster size.

Just about to start the whole process again for the D partition.

So happy right now.

Thanks again guys

 

You don't need to realign the D: drive.
On the other hand, if you try to realign, it will only take 15 sec, cause it's already aligned, so there's no wasted time there.

Glad we could be of help, E.B.E.

 

The linked explanation of how to convert FAT32 to NTFS says that partitions formatted as FAT32 with OSes previous to WinXP will end up with weird cluster sizes and need re-aligning. Would the drive in the W3J have been formatted with XP, and thus not need to be aligned, or do I still need to go through this process if I want to convert my drive?