How To Convert from FAT32 to NTFS!

External hard drives are easy to come by and you most likely either have one or have worked on one before. They are cheap and allows you to easily hold gigabytes and gigabytes of files while on the move. One trend that I have noticed is that when you purchase a new external hard drive or a USB thumb drive from the store, they usually come pre-formatted with the FAT32 file system. While that might not bother a lot of people, you might want to switch over to the NTFS file system to get rid of the older file system’s limitation and I will go over just how easily you can do that here.

File Systems

FAT32 (File Allocation Table) and NTFS (New Technology File System) are file systems used by Windows to help you store and locate files on your hard drive. One of the best analogies to help you see how file systems work is by comparing your hard drive to a public library. You can think of the file systems as the catalog or the help desk. When you want to find a book, you would usually consult the catalog to see just where the book is located in that huge library. Once you have the exact location, locating the book becomes a much more simpler task. File systems can be looked at in a similar light. Your hard disk contains hundreds of thousands of files and when you work with them, it doesn’t just ‘magically’ appear on your screen as some would like to think! Behind the scene, your hard drive consults the file system in use, which in turn allows it to gain the knowledge of the file location and then will it be able to fulfill your request. Obviously the actual steps are much more complicated that that but in theory, that’s how it works.

Why You Would Want to Use NTFS

So now you’re thinking how this actually relates to you. The answer is once again, it depends! FAT32 is the more outdated file system of the two. However, due to that fact and how Microsoft loves to make everything backwards compatible, it’s still in use today by many systems that don’t demand too much of their hard drive, feature wise. NTFS is the default file system today. Rather than explaining in details of each file system, I’ll put it in simple terms. If you want to store files bigger than 4GB in size, you’ll need to switch over to NTFS! This is one of the main reason why you would want to convert over to NTFS. If you encountered an error message similar to this picture, than you have encountered one of the major limitations of using thia older file system:

At one point you were probably scratching your head wondering just how could that be since you just bought your new external hard drive and that it has plenty of space! How dare the computer tell me I don’t have enough space! FAT32 limits you to file sizes of no more than 4GB. Therefore, if you download large high definition movies or work with large databases, using FAT32 is out of the question! Another major limitation of FAT32 is the lack of native compression, encryption, and security support on the file system itself. If you want or need any one of those features, you’ll either need to use third party utilities (Windows does support the creation of .zip files natively for compression) or convert the drive to NTFS. External hard drives and thumb drives rarely need these features and so pre-formatting them to FAT32 seems the best option as the file system is supported amongst the most operating systems out there in use today. But once again, if you need to store a 4GB+ file on that drive, using FAT32 goes right out the window.

The Conversion Process

The conversion process from FAT32 to NTFS as mentioned earlier is really simple. However, there are a couple of suggestions I must tell you about. The method I will be detailing here is a one-way process. You can only convert from FAT32 to NTFS and not the other way around. If you have a NTFS drive and want to downgrade to FAT32, you will either need to reformat, not convert, the drive to use FAT2 or use third party utilities to get the job done. Secondly, and for the good news, is that the FAT32 to NTFS conversion process will retain your files on the drive. Remember, we are converting and not formatting so the files should remain relatively safe. However, as we all know, computers have a weird habit of working the opposite way so it’s better if you make a backup of all your important files on the drive *before* starting the conversion process. Lastly, in order for the process to go smoothly, you’ll want to make sure that you have some free space on the drive that is being converted. If not, then you will not be able to complete the conversion process.

1. First you’ll want to make sure that your drive is indeed FAT32. Do so by heading in My Computer, right clicking on your drive and going into the Properties menu. On the General tab, it should tell you the file system in use. As you can see in the picture below, I have files stored in the drive as well. You’ll also want to note the drive letter it is currently using because we will need to specify it during the conversion process. In my example, it will be the G: drive.

2. For extra caution, you’ll want to make a backup of your most important files in the drive (store them on a different drive!). Although the process should retain all of your data, it doesn’t hurt to make a backup copy!

3. Now, open a command prompt in Start || All Programs || Accessories || Command Prompt. Or you can simply open a Run box and type in ‘cmd’ and press Enter. If you are using Vista or Windows 7, you might want to elevate the command prompt to administrator privileges by typing ‘cmd’ in the Search box, right click on the command prompt icon in the result list and selecting Run as Administrator.

4. Once you have the command prompt open, we can now type in the command to convert the drive. The command is:

convert drive letter: /fs:ntfs

Replace ‘drive letter’ obviously with your actual drive letter! In my case, it will be the letter G:.

5. Once you hit Enter, the process will begin. Depending on how large your disk is, the time will vary. If everything went as planned, it will notify you when the process has completed and that should be the end of it.

6. The last step is to verify everything is intact. Head back into your drive and make sure all of your important files are still there and accessible. Head into the drive properties and in the General tab, it should show that the drive is now working under the NTFS file system. Now you can import larger files to the drive without much trouble!