PC Hardware in a Nutshell, 3rd Edition

NTFS

The native filesystem of Windows NT/2000/XP, NTFS places effectively no limits on the sizes of partitions, volumes, and files. NTFS is faster, more robust, and more secure than any FAT filesystem. If your computer runs Windows NT/2000/XP, there are only two reasons not to use NTFS. The first is that because only Windows NT/2000/XP (and, of course, Linux) can access NTFS volumes, using NTFS in a dual-boot environment means that the other operating system will not be able to access the NTFS volumes.

Second, there is a paucity of disk diagnosis and repair utilities available that are NTFS-aware. For a long time, Microsoft recommended creating a small FAT partition as the system partition from which NT would boot, and devoting the rest of the disk to one or more large NTFS partitions. Microsoft’s thinking was that if there was a problem on the NTFS boot partition, you might still be able to get the system booted so that you could run a disk diagnostic utility. In practice, doing this doesn’t accomplish much.

Although the Windows 2000/XP Recovery Console is a useful utility, it does not always allow you to recover from problems. For that reason, we generally configure our Windows 2000/XP systems to dual-boot two copies of the same operating system. By that, we mean that you should install your main Windows NT/2000/XP installation on one large NTFS volume, and install a second minimal Windows NT/2000/XP installation on another NTFS volume, ideally on a different physical drive. If ...