NTFS and lan parties

[cracker099]

I regularly have lan parties and my house, where we do a lot of file sharing too. I just upgraded to XP and I've been hearing alot about the NTFS file system. All my friends use fat32 on there computers, so if I converted to NTFS will we still be able to share files over the lan? Play games?

 

[AndyHui]

Please read the FAQs:

FAT32 vs NTFS

How do I convert from FAT32 to NTFS?

Using FAT32 and NTFS on the same system

Those will answer ALL of your questions.

 

[Barnaby W. Füi]

it will have no effect. the filesystem determines how the files are arranged and stored on your hard drive, and only your hard drive. the files are unchanged. you could take a file from you fat32 drive, put it on a ntfs drive, transfer it to a floppy, burn it to a cd, transfer it over the net to a mac user, have them put it on a zip disk and then save it on their linux box using ext2, ftp it back to your fat32 box and it would be the same file and you could still use it.

the only thing that i know of similar to what you are thinking is macs and data forks. i should go read up on them. but if you are not using a mac, then dont worry about that.

 

[n0cmonkey]

<< it will have no effect. the filesystem determines how the files are arranged and stored on your hard drive, and only your hard drive. the files are unchanged. you could take a file from you fat32 drive, put it on a ntfs drive, transfer it to a floppy, burn it to a cd, transfer it over the net to a mac user, have them put it on a zip disk and then save it on their linux box using ext2, ftp it back to your fat32 box and it would be the same file and you could still use it.

the only thing that i know of similar to what you are thinking is macs and data forks. i should go read up on them. but if you are not using a mac, then dont worry about that.

>>



Im not positive, but I dont think the Data Forks have as many problems in OS X. I frequently share files from my Mac to a WinNT/2k machine or two, and have never had problems. Of course, I dont use anything before OS X

 

[Barnaby W. Füi]

i was just reading about data forks and the article made it seem that they only pertain to how its stored on the drive, but a mac friend told me that if you transfer a mac file to a pc and then back, it wont always work again.

i'm not really all that sure.

 

[n0cmonkey]

<< i was just reading about data forks and the article made it seem that they only pertain to how its stored on the drive, but a mac friend told me that if you transfer a mac file to a pc and then back, it wont always work again.

i'm not really all that sure. >>



Ive heard of that, and read up a little on it, but like I said, Ive never seen the problem in Mac OS X. I believe data forks are extra information required to run the application (or whatever). That data gets corrupted or destroyed on occassion, and that causes problems.

 

[Nothinman]

i was just reading about data forks and the article made it seem that they only pertain to how its stored on the drive, but a mac friend told me that if you transfer a mac file to a pc and then back, it wont always work again.

i'm not really all that sure.

What happens is Macs store data about the file (icon, program creator, time stamps, etc) in a seperate stream in the filesystem from the file data so it sticks with the file no matter what. When you copy a Mac file to an NTFS partition if you're using Mac file sharing that file info stream gets copied too, to another file stream in a very similar way to how Macs store it. If you copy the file back using SMB or somet other non-Mac method you lose the file info, if you use Mac sharing you should be fine.