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Why NTFS and FAT do not function together

Posted By : Michelle of Mesa Community College on October 19, 2002

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I am running win2000 professional on my comnputer and have been having great problems reloading windows98 onto my second computer here because of the lack of a proper floppy boot disk comtaining drivers for the cd rom. I have now pulled out my cd and attatched the hard drive that i want to reload windows 98 on and copied all the files on to it using my burner but still have to actually hit the install programme for it,the problem is as i am using an NT system it wont let me and tells me to install it in DOS...i dont know how to do this...can someone please instruct me step by step in how to do this.

Thankyou.

This question was answered on October 19, 2002. Much of the information contained herein may have changed since posting.


Your Windows 98 operating system uses a file system called FAT 16 or FAT 32 Windows 2000 Professional allows you to choose either NTFS or FAT 32 file system when you install the operating system These file systems determine how Windows stores data on the hard drive for easy and fast access Access to other file systems such as FAT and HPFS can happen only when both drives are formated with FAT 32 not using NTFS option in Windows 2000.

NTFS can read FAT 16, FAT 32, but the DOS FAT file systems can not read NTFS ALL PROGRAMS USE DOS to boot Then other operating systems format the remaining disk area in a different data storage system like NTFS and HPFS.

This is the reason you can not load Windows 98 onto a disk that has been formated using NTFS even though you burn program files directly onto the installation CD you are trying to create.(when copy failed to transfer your Windows 98 OS) It would be equivalent to writting GERMAN words mixed with ENGLISH in the same sentence Windows 98 FAT and Windows 2000 NTFS speak different languages you might say as a metafor The way they store data on a hard drive is different for certain

You can change only once from DOS FAT file allocation to NTFS but not NTFS back to DOS FAT files after initial installation of Windows 2000.

You can either reinstall Windows 2000 to use FAT file system not NTFS on Hard drive #1 then format your hard drive #2 using the same file system Finally, you can load your Windows 98 on drive #2 If you decide to change drive #1 back to NTFS you will not be able to access the drive from drive #2 Windows 98 (formated with FAT file storage)

Or you can find a Windows 98 installation disk (formated with FAT 32 file system) to use for formatting the hard drive you want Windows 98 OS on Remember this is the only way to have access to both Windows 2000 and Windows 98 data on one or more drives or partitions (the file allocation tables must be the same Hope this helps!

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Posted by Michelle of Mesa Community College on October 19, 2002

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