NTFS recovery tools

[pjfuller 0]

Hello,

 

I currently have NT 4.0 + sp6a installed, i want to upgrade to a bigger harddisk (20~30g), currently i have FAT on a 4.1g drive. Obviously its got 2 x 2g partitions. So why the question?

 

1. If i install a new harddisk, with NTFS installed, can i have a partition bigger then 2 gig.

 

2. If the machine dies, can i get to the harddisk ? Linux ? some tools?

 

3. Would NTFS cause me problems with any software (dos based stuff?)?

 

Cheers paul

[Brian Frank 0]

I'm not sure about anything related to NT, so I'll skip that part.

As far as your machine dying, depends on what dies. If your hard drive goes kaput completely, you may have to get spe[censored]ts to recover the data--so get some sort of backup drive (ie: CD-RW, Zip, Tape, etc.).

NTFS can't be read naturally by dos or Win9x without having a program--I think it's called NTFSDOS, not sure--but the free version gets DOS to read NTFS. The programs themselves won't care what filesystem they're under tho. If you have a 2GB partition setup for DOS, you should be okay, but then were talking a dual boot here. In that case, install DOS first, then NT.

 

I'm not sure about the first question, because I've only used Win2k and XP, and I'm not sure about the NTFS in NT applying the same. I believe it doesn't have the same limitations in NT as FAT does, but I can't be totally sure.

[*Iblis* 0]

1. Yes NTFS supports partitions larger than 2GB

2. Linux has a NTFS driver with beta write capabilites, otherwise NTFSDOS is free for the read-only version, pay for read/write, a similar program is available for win9x if you dual-boot. With windows 2000 there's a recovery console you can use, don't know if there's a similar utility for NT4

3. The only problems you'll have is reading/writing to the drive in DOS (see above). Once in windows no program should access the file system at a level low enough to cause problems with NTFS.