OK, I got 2 win XP boxes on a home LAN. I’m using FAT32 as my file system. When I first installed win 2k several years ago I tried NTFS but it didn’t play well with my dual boot of win98. Or at least that’s what I thought at the time. I know I reinstalled after about a month of problems and switched back to FAT32 with no problems. Anyway, will switching my 2 boxes to NTFS help as much as they say? I still dual boot on one of the boxes with ME because we can’t get XP to recognize a larger flash card in our digital camera. Will it screw up ME? Any horror stories or perfect stories? Anything I should look out for?
An NTFS partition cannot be read by the Windows 9x/ME family. NTFS can be read by Windows NT/2K/XP.
Therefore, if you dual-boot, when you’re booted to ME, the NTFS partition will be unreadable.
That being said, NTFS has less wasted space and incorportates file-level security that FAT cannot match. If you don’t need to read the NTFS partion when booted to ME, then I’d recommend it.
One option would be to convert one box to NTFS and leave the other as FAT, then share the NTFS disk to the FAT machine. Since the NTFS is being hosted as a windows share, the Win98 box will be able to read & write to it.
I would also offer that the flash-card issue should be fixable.
-B