Virtual Machine and NTFS

John John - MVP wrote:

Other than saying that this behavior was "by design", Microsoft
has never said *why* they gave the NT line of OS's the handicap
of not being able to create FAT32 volumes larger than 32 gb.

Raymond Chen talks about this he

Windows Confidential A Brief and Incomplete History of FAT32

=============
For a 32GB FAT32 drive, it takes 4 megabytes of disk I/O to compute the
amount of free space.
============

You do realize how trivial a 4 mb data transfer is, today and even 5, 10
years ago - don't you?

Chen doesn't mention any other file or drive operation as being impacted
by having a large cluster count other than the computation of free space
- which I believe is infrequently performed anyways.

I formatted a 500 gb drive as a single FAT32 volume using 4kb cluser
size just as an excercise to test if Windows 98se could be installed and
function on such a volume, and it did - with the exception that it would
not create a swap file on such a volume.

And as Chen mentions, yes - the *first* directory command on FAT32
volumes with a high cluster-count does take a few minutes (but not
successive directory commands). What I found in my testing that either
in DOS or under Win-98, that the first dir command (or explorer-view) is
instantaneous as long as the number of clusters doesn't exceed 6.3
million. This equates to a FAT size of about 25 mb.

I have installed win-98 on FAT32 volumes of various sizes, formatted
with a range of cluster sizes from 4kb to 32kb resulting in volumes
ranging from 6 to 40 million clusters and have seen no evidence of a
performance hit during file manipulations, copying, searching, etc.

You on the other hand seem to think that having the FAT as
large as possible and then page it to disk is a smart thing
to do...

Other than the first dir command or first explorer session, I have seen
no performance hit under win-9x or even under XP when installed on FAT32
volumes with large FATs.

For NTFS file system is like a woman instead A Big Hard Drive is better for
my file system!
and Windows 98 is like a old man instead more then FAT32, will be to Big
and all the oil in the world will not make his file system run right!



"Philo Pastry" John John - MVP Win The Debate Hands Down so give up!

"Philo Pastry" No you concede the debate

Philo Pastry wrote:
John John - MVP wrote:

Other than saying that this behavior was "by design", Microsoft
has never said *why* they gave the NT line of OS's the handicap
of not being able to create FAT32 volumes larger than 32 gb.

Raymond Chen talks about this he

Windows Confidential A Brief and Incomplete History of FAT32

=============
For a 32GB FAT32 drive, it takes 4 megabytes of disk I/O to compute the
amount of free space.
============

You do realize how trivial a 4 mb data transfer is, today and even 5, 10
years ago - don't you?

Chen doesn't mention any other file or drive operation as being impacted
by having a large cluster count other than the computation of free space
- which I believe is infrequently performed anyways.

I formatted a 500 gb drive as a single FAT32 volume using 4kb cluser
size just as an excercise to test if Windows 98se could be installed and
function on such a volume, and it did - with the exception that it would
not create a swap file on such a volume.

Well, that's really nice. No swap file? Great. (Plus the other utilities
you said that won't work anymore (like the much faster version of Defrag
from WinME).

And as Chen mentions, yes - the *first* directory command on FAT32
volumes with a high cluster-count does take a few minutes (but not
successive directory commands).

A few *minutes*???? Are you kidding me??? THAT is totally unacceptible.
I get annoyed when XP takes 5 seconds to initially display something that
should be near instantaneous.

With all the things you've mentioned it sure seems like there is a price to
pay. Oh yeah, not the least of which is you can't *ever* have a file
larger than 4 GB (this can be a pit of a PIA for some photo, video, and disk
imaging work)

(All that being said, I do miss the ability to boot up into DOS, if I ever
want to or had to. But that's about the only thing) Well, actually I
can still boot into DOS on my thumb drive, but it's not quite the same thing
as having the good ole DOS fallback option).

What I found in my testing that either
in DOS or under Win-98, that the first dir command (or explorer-view) is
instantaneous as long as the number of clusters doesn't exceed 6.3
million. This equates to a FAT size of about 25 mb.

Which is a LONG ways from the 500 MB mentioned.

"Philo Pastry" wrote in message
...

About 3 years ago I installed XP on a 250 gb FAT-32 partitioned hard
drive and installed Adobe Premier CS3. It had no problems creating
large video files that spanned the 4 gb file-size limit of FAT32.

XP install Hmm that can not be right
it have to be a NTFS for a 250 gb to install
or you do not partition all the Hard Drive

Now I have to see this
Make a Screen Capture
And post it to http://mynews.ath.cx/doc/phUploader.php
Here my Screen Capture
http://mynews.ath.cx/doc/uploads/ntfs.jpg

"Philo Pastry" wrote in message
...
John John - MVP wrote:

People working with video editing and multimedia files often run
across this 4GB file limitations. Backup/imaging utilities also
often run into problems caused by this file size limitation,

About 3 years ago I installed XP on a 250 gb FAT-32 partitioned hard
drive and installed Adobe Premier CS3. It had no problems creating
large video files that spanned the 4 gb file-size limit of FAT32.

OK, explain how I get (Using Acronis True Image Backup)
"The incremental backup will exceed the 4Gb limit in your backup file
location"

After I raised a new backup location on a NTFS partion I never get the
above warning.


Windows XP cannot format partitions larger than 32GB to FAT32
because the increasing size of the FAT for bigger volumes makes
these volumes less efficient (bla bla bla)

Other than saying that this behavior was "by design", Microsoft has
never said *why* they gave the NT line of OS's the handicap of not being
able to create FAT32 volumes larger than 32 gb.

It's a fallacy that the entire FAT must be loaded into memory by any OS
(win-9x/XP, etc) for the OS to access the volume.

Go ahead and cite some performance statistics that show that performance
of random-size file read/write operations go down as the FAT size (# of
clusters) goes up.

Remember, we are not talking about cluster size here. FAT32 cluster
size (and hence small file storage efficiency) can be exactly the same
as NTFS regardless the size of the volume.

On Sun, 17 Oct 2010 10:15:49 -0400, Philo is wrong
wrote:


What you don't understand about NTFS is that it will silently delete
user-data to restore it's own integrity as a way to cope with a failed
transaction, while FAT32 will create lost or orphaned clusters that are
recoverable but who's existance is not itself a liability to the user or
the file system.

I'll say this. At first when win98FE crashed, I would find files that
were missing, whole mailboxes of my email program iirc. I would do
chkdsk and in the chk files I would find much of the data that was
missing. At the least I could search it for lost info, and maybe I
was able to rename the files to the original names, even if there was
garbage (prior data) at the end of the cluster or whatever.

I wondered why there was nothing in Windows, afaik, like there is in
mainframes. When one copies a 1000 byte file to a 100 byte file in an
IBM mainframe with languages like Cobol, it gives a 100 byte result,
with the other 900 truncated. That's what I wanted to do here, but I
couldn't find a way to do it.

The thing some people find convenient about fat32 is that the
system can easily be accessed by a win98 boot floppy.

Or, if you've installed DOS first on an FAT32 drive, and then install XP
as a second OS, you can have a choice at boot-up to run DOS or XP.

Why not just put all the dos files in the XP partition, and use a dos
boot disk to boot to that? Like with win98. There aren't many DOS
files, and none that I know of will used by XP. Nor will DOS have to
use any XP files, except when trying to fix things.

However an NTFS drive can still be accessed from the repair
console...

The repair console is garbage and does not compare in any way to the
utility and capability of a real DOS-type command environment.

I've used it for fixboot and fixmbr, but I thought the set of commands
was small, and I read they don't work in the same way dos commands do.


But I still haven't read most of this thread or formed any
conclusions.

On Sun, 17 Oct 2010 10:05:14 -0400, "glee"
wrote:

"mm" wrote in message
.. .
On Sat, 16 Oct 2010 07:16:58 -0500, philo wrote:

On 10/16/2010 12:33 AM, mm wrote:
Hi! I"m moving to a new machine that probably won't run win98, so I
planned to run it from a Virtual Machine under winxpsp3

Is it okay to have all the harddrive partitions NTFS, even though
win98 can't normally read NTFS?




It should work just fine.

If there are any problems they will not be due to the drive being NTFS
at any rate

Great, thank you. Now I have all the parts to fix up my friends old
2.4 gig Dell for myself. I think I'll like the increased speed.

snip

Are you using XPSP3 Home or Pro Edition as the host OS?

Pro, it appears. That was what was on this DELL before the HD failed
and he gave me the computer and the CD's that came with it.

If you find the old Connectix version 5 does not do all you want, try
the newer free version, Virtual PC 2007:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/e...displaylang=en

I would rather have newer! Thanks.

I read, probably in the wikip entry for this, that it was free for a
while after MS bought it, but it also gavem me the impression it
wasn't anymore. No time now to go reread it. I'm happy to have the
new version.

Thanks.

On Mon, 18 Oct 2010 09:16:29 -0400, "glee"
wrote:

"J. P. Gilliver (John)" wrote in message
...
In message , glee
writes:
[]
Are you using XPSP3 Home or Pro Edition as the host OS?

If you find the old Connectix version 5 does not do all you want, try
the newer free version, Virtual PC 2007:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/e...d=04D26402-319
9-48A3-AFA2-2DC0B40A73B6&displaylang=en

Thanks for the link.

That page says:

Supported Operating Systems:Windows Server 2003, Standard Edition
(32-bit x86);Windows Server 2003, Standard x64 Edition;Windows Vista
Business;Windows Vista Business 64-bit edition;Windows Vista
Enterprise;Windows Vista Enterprise 64-bit edition;Windows Vista
Ultimate;Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit edition;Windows XP Professional
Edition;Windows XP Professional x64 Edition;Windows XP Tablet PC
Edition

...

Virtual PC 2007 runs on: Windows Vista™ Business; Windows Vista™
Enterprise; Windows Vista™ Ultimate; Windows Server 2003, Standard
Edition; Windows Server 2003, Standard x64 Edition; Windows XP
Professional; Windows XP Professional x64 Edition; or Windows XP
Tablet PC Edition

under "System Requirements". It's not clear to me, but I think the
first list must be the OSs the virtual machine can run, and the second
list the host OSs it'll run under. But anyway, I see no mention of
Home in either list; are you saying it will and they're just not
telling us?

The second list are the operating systems you can install it on, as a
host machine. I have read elsewhere that it will install and run on XP
Home as well as Pro, but have never tried.

The first list is what operating systems are "supported" to be run as a
virtual system on the host. Other systems can be run....Win98, Linux,
etc...they are just not "supported" , meaning you won't get any help or
support for issues, there may not be Additions available for everything,
or there may only be partial functionality of the unsupported virtual
system.

The version I bought, albeit for 3 dollars, Connectix Virtual PC for
Windows version 5, says on the box that it allows as a guest system
DOS, 3.1, ....up to XP home and pro, Linux, Netware, OS/2 and Solaris
8.

It doesn't say anything about supporting them or not, and I figure
that's because Connectix was not an MS company and there was no reason
to think it could support OSes.

But MS has to disclaim support for OSes it no longer supports, or some
crank will sue them, they fear.

As to Host OSes, it lists 2000, NT 4, ME, 98SE, XP Home and XP Pro.

Of course they could have removed functionality, perhaps for very good
reason in V. PC 2007. It might be years before I actually try this,
since I plan to keep the old win98/xp computer in my basement.
Hopefully win98 will work by then.

On Tue, 19 Oct 2010 02:39:08 -0500, wrote:

On Sat, 16 Oct 2010 01:33:28 -0400, mm
wrote:

Hi! I"m moving to a new machine that probably won't run win98, so I
planned to run it from a Virtual Machine under winxpsp3

Is it okay to have all the harddrive partitions NTFS, even though
win98 can't normally read NTFS?

Thanks


Much Less important:
Is Connectix Virtual PC for Windows, version 5, okay? Or is it
obsolete by now. It lists XP on the box, but I wonder if it will have
USB support with version 5.


Use FAT. Why use NTFS for ANYTHING? If you encounter an error on a
FAT partition, you can retrieve everything unless the hard drive
itself fails. If you crash a NTFS partition, kill ALL your data
goodbye, because there is no way to retrieve anything.

Heck, on a FAT partition, you can just stick in a DOS bootdisk and
access all your data. Why make life complicated when there is no
advantage whatsoever to using NTFS.

You know, until just now, I figured there was something like DOS to
access NTFS partitions. It never occurred to me that there wouldn't
be.

Thanks.

Even if your drive access is a
tiny bit faster with NTFS, is this worth losing everything? I always
tell people who format NTFS that they damn well better backup their
hard drive at least twice every hour, because if a NTFS installation
fails, IT'S OVER.....