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Virtual Machine and NTFS
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. |
#2
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Virtual Machine and NTFS
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 snip |
#3
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Virtual Machine and NTFS
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 |
#4
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Virtual Machine and NTFS
In message , mm
writes: 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 If you're actually starting from scratch (which "have all the parts" suggests to me that you are) anyway, received wisdom here seems to be that you should set it up as FAT anyway: the alleged benefits of NTFS being largely moot for the single home user, and XP will operate perfectly happily under FAT. -- J. P. Gilliver. UMRA: 1960/1985 MB++G.5AL-IS-P--Ch++(p)Ar@T0H+Sh0!:`)DNAf freedom of speech is useless if nobody can hear you. -- David Harris -- Author, Pegasus Mail Dunedin, May 2002. |
#5
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Virtual Machine and NTFS
On 10/17/2010 04:02 AM, J. P. Gilliver (John) wrote:
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 If you're actually starting from scratch (which "have all the parts" suggests to me that you are) anyway, received wisdom here seems to be that you should set it up as FAT anyway: the alleged benefits of NTFS being largely moot for the single home user, and XP will operate perfectly happily under FAT. I beg to differ. First off, on a large partition fat32 has very poor cluster size as compared to NTFS. Additionally , since many people are now storing movies and such with large files sizes, fat32 cannot handle any files over 4 gigs . Additionally, XP is *deliberately* crippled in that it cannot create a fat32 partition larger than 32 gigs. If one wanted to install XP on a fat32 partition larger than 32 gigs, though it's possible to do... it's not possible to do from the XP installer. Though for a home user, the security features of NTFS may not be needed, what's extremely important is the fault tolerance of NTFS. I do a lot of computer repair work and have seen entire fat32 file systems hosed by a bad shut down. The user, in attempt to fix things has typically run scandisk and *sometimes* has ended up with a drive full of ..chk files. OTOH: I've seen some rather dramatic file system recoveries under NTFS running chkdsk /f or chkdsk /r . Note: I am not saying a bad shut down will always destroy a fat32 installed OS...nor am I saying that NTFS is infallible. What I am saying is that NTFS is considerably more resilient. The thing some people find convenient about fat32 is that the system can easily be accessed by a win98 boot floppy. However an NTFS drive can still be accessed from the repair console...or from a live Linux cd |
#6
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Virtual Machine and NTFS
"J. P. Gilliver (John)" wrote in message
... In message , mm writes: 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 If you're actually starting from scratch (which "have all the parts" suggests to me that you are) anyway, received wisdom here seems to be that you should set it up as FAT anyway: the alleged benefits of NTFS being largely moot for the single home user, and XP will operate perfectly happily under FAT. I too must beg to differ, for many of the same reasons as philo. There are other reasons besides security to use NTFS in this scenario. Also, if you use FAT32, you will have to limit Virtual PC's VHD files' size to 4GB....another shortcoming. -- Glen Ventura MS MVP Oct. 2002 - Sept. 2009 CompTIA A+ http://dts-l.net/ |
#7
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Virtual Machine and NTFS
"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? 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 -- Glen Ventura MS MVP Oct. 2002 - Sept. 2009 CompTIA A+ http://dts-l.net/ |
#8
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Virtual Machine and NTFS
philo wrote:
If you're actually starting from scratch (which "have all the parts" suggests to me that you are) anyway, received wisdom here seems to be that you should set it up as FAT anyway: the alleged benefits of NTFS being largely moot for the single home user, and XP will operate perfectly happily under FAT. I beg to differ. First off, on a large partition fat32 has very poor cluster size as compared to NTFS. That is myth #1. I have formatted a 500 gb SATA drive as single partition FAT32 using 4 kb cluster size (the default cluster size for NTFS) and have installed and run Windows 98se from such a drive. That drive had 120 million clusters, and is not compatible with certain drive diagnostic and optimization tools (like the windows me version of scandisk). The DOS version of scandisk does run and function properly, however. You must use third-party drive preparation software to create a FAT32 volume with non-standard cluster size, because Microsoft intentionally forces format.com to scale up the cluster size along with the volume size so as to maintain about a max of 2 million clusters. There is no technical reason for doing this, but it established the concept in the minds of many that FAT32 has this problem where it must use large cluster sizes as volumes get bigger. All that said, it should be noted that maintaining a small cluster size (say 4 kb) on a relatively large volume (say, anything larger than 32 gb) is not really useful from a file-layout perspective. For those that have large drives (250 gb or larger) and that create large partitions just to store large media files, the use of 32kb clusters is more optimal than 4 kb. Additionally , since many people are now storing movies and such with large files sizes, fat32 cannot handle any files over 4 gigs. While that is true, it rarely comes up as a realistic or practical limitation for FAT32. The most common multimedia format in common use is the DVD .VOB file, which self-limit themselves to be 1 gb. The only file type that I ever see exceed the 4 gb size are virtual machine image files, which you will not see on a win-9x machine but you would see on an XP (or higher) PC running VM Ware, Microsoft Virtual PC, etc. But 4 gb should be enough to contain a modest image of a virtual windows-98 machine. Additionally, XP is *deliberately* crippled in that it cannot create a fat32 partition larger than 32 gigs. That is true, but it's not a limitation of FAT32 (I thought this was a list of bad things about FAT32). There is plenty of third-party software that allows you to create FAT32 volumes larger than 32 gb on a win-2k/XP/etc machine, and one can always boot an MS-DOS floppy with format and fdisk and create such a volume that way. If one wanted to install XP on a fat32 partition larger than 32 gigs, though it's possible to do... it's not possible to do from the XP installer. If a the desired FAT32 partition has already been created before starting the installation of XP, then XP will install itself onto that partition, even if the partition is larger than 32 gb. Though for a home user, the security features of NTFS may not be needed, what's extremely important is the fault tolerance of NTFS. Given modern drives that for the past 5 to 8 years have had their own ability to detect and re-map bad sectors and their own internal caching, the need for the transaction journalling performed by NTFS has been greatly reduced. And for the typical home or SOHO PC that is not a server, NTFS is more of a liability than a benefit. NTFS is a proprietary format and is not fully documented. It's directory structure is stored in a distrubuted way across the drive, mixed in with user data. An NTFS volume can be hosed in such a way as to render recovery practically impossible, and most NTFS recovery software is very expensive. FAT32 file structure is simple and file-chain reconstruction is trivial and can restore any volume that at first look appears to be completely trashed. The extra sophistication and transaction journalling performed by NTFS reduces it's overall performance compared to FAT32. So for those who want to optimize the over-all speed of their PC's, FAT32 is a faster file system than NTFS. I do a lot of computer repair work and have seen entire fat32 file systems hosed by a bad shut down. The user, in attempt to fix things has typically run scandisk and *sometimes* has ended up with a drive full of .chk files. That's another common myth about FAT32 - that the appearance of many ..chk files must mean that it's inferior to NTFS. While it might look untidy, the mere existance of those .chk files don't mean anything about how compentent or capable FAT32 is, and it's not hard to just delete them and get on with your business. You did not say in your example if the user's drive and OS was operable and functional despite the existance of those .chk files. What I am saying is that NTFS is considerably more resilient. 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. 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. 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. |
#9
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Virtual Machine and NTFS
On 10/17/2010 09:15 AM, Philo is wrong wrote:
philo wrote: snip I'm snipping most of this as I don't want to get into a big argument here and yes, you've made some valid points but I will respond to the following as it's important: While it might look untidy, the mere existance of those .chk files don't mean anything about how compentent or capable FAT32 is, and it's not hard to just delete them and get on with your business. You did not say in your example if the user's drive and OS was operable and functional despite the existance of those .chk files. In some cases, after running scandisk, there were a lot of .chk files but the operating system and data are intact...the .chk files can simply be deleted However in *some* situations I've seen all or most data on the drive converted to .chk files and a data recovery of any type would be close to impossible. The likelihood of a "repair" turning that catastrophic on an NTFS file system is considerably less...though of course not impossible. As I've mentioned, I've seen some nearly miraculous recoveries on NTFS systems...one I recall vividly was on a drive that had physically gone into failure and had severe read/write errors. Though it was tedious I ended up retrieving 99% of the data... and that was due to NTFS' MFT which is of course lacking on fat32 |
#10
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Virtual Machine and NTFS
FAT32 system and NTFS system set up the cluster sizes the same way to the
size of the Hard Drive! Philo that's way they say you are wrong XP FAT32 system and NTFS repair the same Philo that's way they say you are wrong And after running scandisk, if their a lot of .chk files it's time to get and New Hard Drive and Xcopy the old Hard Drive it! Philo that's way they say you are wrong And you have a Linux i686; and reading the Newsgroups from a Thunderbird Philo that's way they say you are wrong |
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