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Thread ID: 110087 2010-06-02 22:41:00 FAT32 TO NFTS PEN STICK norrol (2154) Press F1
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1106305 2010-06-02 22:41:00 I have Windows 7 Home Premium and have been unable to change a 32 Gb pen stick I have from fat32 to nfts so I can use the pen stick for backups.
Is it possible to change a removable drive such as a pen stick from fat32 to ntfs in windows 7?
Thanks for any help
norrol (2154)
1106306 2010-06-02 22:45:00 Well if it doesnt work, it doesnt work. Not much you can do about it. Most USB flash drives, werent made to be formatted in NTFS Speedy Gonzales (78)
1106307 2010-06-02 23:10:00 Flash drives work fine in NTFS, most of mine are. It's just that windows doesn't format them in NTFS. ;)

Use Gparted or a similar utility.
wratterus (105)
1106308 2010-06-03 00:33:00 Well if it doesnt work, it doesnt work. Not much you can do about it. Most USB flash drives, werent made to be formatted in NTFS
Not very helpful Speedy, and also not correct. Most flash devices present themselves to the OS as a standard block device, and as such can be formatted to any filesystem that takes your fancy - including NTFS.

Norrol: How are you trying to format it - have you tried doing it from the disk management tool? Windows 7 should definitely be able to do this for you. Wratterus' suggestion to use Gparted is also a good one.
Erayd (23)
1106309 2010-06-03 00:48:00 Whatever, just dont plan on booting from it tho, that wont work Speedy Gonzales (78)
1106310 2010-06-03 01:13:00 Whatever, just dont plan on booting from it tho, that wont work
Wrong again - you can boot from it just fine provided it's set up correctly.

Please don't state your guesses as fact; if you're guessing, then say so. Leading users who don't know better down the wrong track will only result in wasted time and frustration, and in some cases wasted money as well.
Erayd (23)
1106311 2010-06-03 02:12:00 And some people are impressed by 30,000 posts. Quality over quantity I say... Not trying to be nasty or anything though, a lot of those have contributed useful information.

Anyway, I have formatted USB Flash drives to NTFS before in XP.

1) Open Device Manager
2) Find your USB drive and open properties of it
3) Go to 'Policies' tab
4) Choose 'Optimize for performance'
5) You should now get the option to use NTFS when you want to format the USB drive.

I have no idea if this works in Windows 7 or not, but if it doesn't and you have access to an XP machine you can do it that way.
Agent_24 (57)
1106312 2010-06-03 02:13:00 I've booted from NTFS thumbdrives many times. Nothing wrong with it.

Rather than using the Windows Backup Utility to do the format, go into My Computer and right-click on the drive and see if you can format it from there using the "Format" option.

If not, then download GParted LiveCD and use that, it's free and will work a treat :)
Chilling_Silence (9)
1106313 2010-06-03 06:09:00 Hi Agent 24,
This system does not work in windows 7 hence my question
thanks anyhow
norrol (2154)
1106314 2010-06-03 06:19:00 Hi Erayd,
have tried using disk management but message I get is unable to complete format.
Will try after downloading Gparted.
Thanks
norrol (2154)
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