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Is NTFS conversion also possible in Windows 95B and 95C?

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computerdude92

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Is it possible? I have never done it before on any win9x OS, but how do you do it?

If I can turn drive C's Fat32 into NTFS on a Windows 95 Pentium II 450 then I could do DVD burning of large iso images. I know it sounds silly, but I'm trying to see if I can replace Windows 2000/XP with windows 95 for doing the same office stuff. The only limitation is being restricted to older versions of software that pretty much does the same thing.
 
You don't, 9x won't recognize an NTFS partition at all, it's not a matter of how to do the conversion. Try their fdisk utility on an (empty) NTFS usb drive for example and you'll see it yourself.
There is software you can use to access an NTFS partition from within windows, but I don't know how it'll behave with what you have in mind.
 
Windows 95, 98 and ME do not support NTFS. There are no drivers to add native NTFS. Even if there were, that would not work around the maximum size limit.

I've read/burned large DVD (8gb) images with ImgBurn under 95. It breaks images up in to segments less than 2GB, and images are not needed if burning files directly from a folder.

Even with NTFS on a hard drive under a later OS, it is usually a good idea to keep individual files less than 2GB for portability across other file systems and compatiblity with other tools.

BTW, FAT32 can technically store files up to just a few bytes under 4GB and ImgBurn will work with them, but 2GB or less is recommended as the explorer shell, file sharing, and other tools may barf on larger files.
 
There are in fact drivers for NTFS for DOS and Win9x, from Sysinternals. See here: https://www.techrepublic.com/article/installing-sysinternals-ntfs-for-windows-98-driver/
As far as I know they only support read-only access to NTFS though.
Also, you won't be able to boot off such a partition. You'd have to install Win9x on a FAT-partition, and then you could add an additional NTFS partition to the system for storage and such. I don't know how Win9x would behave with files larger than 4 GB though. I really don't think it's worth the effort, to be honest. Just use an appropriate OS.
 
Paragon Software used to have a Win98 version of their NTFS drivers. Full read/write access but slow, way too slow to work with DVD burning.
 
computerdude92 said:
Is it possible? I have never done it before on any win9x OS, but how do you do it?

If I can turn drive C's Fat32 into NTFS on a Windows 95 Pentium II 450 then I could do DVD burning of large iso images. I know it sounds silly, but I'm trying to see if I can replace Windows 2000/XP with windows 95 for doing the same office stuff. The only limitation is being restricted to older versions of software that pretty much does the same thing.
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Its not possible to use NTFS natively as a replacement of FAT32 as others have mentioned. I'm curious as to why you would want to not use W2k? Thats a nice OS. Pretty lean compared to XP.and more stable than Win9x.
 
Caluser2000 said:
Its not possible to use NTFS natively as a replacement of FAT32 as others have mentioned. I'm curious as to why you would want to not use W2k? Thats a nice OS. Pretty lean compared to XP.and more stable than Win9x.
Click to expand...

I really don't like Win2k. It has serious bugs. For example if you press cancel instead of updating to service pack 4 then reboot, you get a NTLDR is missing error message. Win2k's stability pales in comparison to Windows XP.

NT4 also sucks. I had it installed on systems in the past and I remember one day after a reboot it would also give a NTLDR is missing error. I did not do anything to provoke it. Crappy as hell coding design. XP is a whole different ballgame. I loved XP more than Windows 7 even.
 
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I remember years ago from my techy friends that people used to convert their Windows 98 systems to NTFS. I'm quite surprised to hear that you believe such a thing is not doable.
 
I used Win 2k for a long time before moving to XP and found it very stable, I still have 2k on an old Computer booting between Dos 6.22 / Win 98 / Win 2k and XP, Never heard of NTFS for 98.
 
computerdude92 said:
I remember years ago from my techy friends that people used to convert their Windows 98 systems to NTFS. I'm quite surprised to hear that you believe such a thing is not doable.
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FWIW I've never seen W95/W98 run on a NTFS partition. Yes, you can convert a FAT partition to NTFS using 'convert.exe' but you'll never be able to access or boot W95/98 on NTFS without some 3rd party software/driver help. You can easily run FAT and NTFS on the same HD if the 1st partition is FAT. It might be that your 'techy' friends were playing with XP, as it was very common to do the NTFS conversion back in the day.
 
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