Hello Mandar: I used win2k a lot at my work and it is possible to convert an
existing win2k ntfs installation to fat32, as win2k does support both ntfs
and fat32.  One of my questions would be why you want to convert to fat32,
is it a performance issue you think you might be fixing?  Maybe you don't
need the added security that ntfs provides? It isn't necessarily a
recommended procedure to convert an existing win2k ntfs installation to
fat32 but it can be done (I have done it several times before and lost a lot
of hair because of it) but you have to jump a few hurdles to get there.
First you would need to use some partition mgmt utility like partition
magic, second after the ntfs to fat32 conversion is done you would reboot
the pc and probably find that windows 2000 wouldn't boot up anymore at which
point you would grab your handy win2k installation cdrom, reboot the pc with
win2k cd and following these instructions:
1.      Boot the computer from the Windows 2000 installation CD-ROM.
2.      When the "Welcome to Setup" screen appears, press R to repair the
installation.
3.      On the Repair Options screen, press R to run the emergency repair
process.
4.      Press M for a manual repair process.
5.      Select only the Verify Windows 2000 system files option.
6.      When you are prompted for an emergency repair disk (ERD), press
ENTER if you have an ERD. If you do not have an ERD, press L to let Setup
search your hard disk. When Setup locates the Windows 2000 installation,
press ENTER to repair it.
7.      A file system check is performed; this check may take a few minutes.
NOTE: If Setup forces a reboot immediately after the file system check, you
must perform the repair process again before continuing with the next step.
8.      When you are prompted to repair files, press A to repair all files.
9.      After the repair process is finished, Windows should boot normally
but without any service pack files installed.  Install the latest & greatest
win2k service pack 3 and reboot your pc, then run windows updates to install
all of the latest security/critical updates.
- Yes this is a lot of work but hey we are talking about computers here,
we're all about working harder not smarter. (just kidding ;-))

Original Message:  From: "Mandar Naik" <[log in to unmask]
Sent: Monday, February 10, 2003 11:37 PM
Subject: [PCBUILD] NTFS to FAT32?
Hi List, Is there a way to convert an NTFS partition to FAT32 without having
to reload the installed OS?I have win2k pro installed on an NTFS
partition,but want to revert to FAT32.  Thank-you, Mandar Naik

            Do you want to signoff PCBUILD or just change to
                    Digest mode - visit our web site:
                   http://freepctech.com/pcbuild.shtml