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gdisk and ntfs version compatibility (Read 6274 times)
besonen
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gdisk and ntfs version compatibility
Sep 18th, 2007 at 4:31am
 
when using gdisk to partition and format ntfs partitions gdisk allows for these ntfs version options:

   [/NTFS[:VISTA|XP|2000|NT4|NT351]]


questions:

what is the default version (i.e. if one is not specified)?

are there fewer forward compatibility issues than backwards?  and if this is the case does it make sense to format all ntfs partitions (regardless of the version of nt being installed) as "/NTFS:VISTA"?
 
 
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nbree
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Re: gdisk and ntfs version compatibility
Reply #1 - Sep 18th, 2007 at 6:37am
 
I don't have the gdisk source with me at home to know what the default is, but those options almost certainly correspond to the internal NTFS version number.

There's not really any actual real structural difference in any of the NTFS "versions" as such. NTFS is a well-designed filesystem that contain all their internal meta-data in what are basically normal files that just aren't shown (this isn't unique to NTFS, it's a classic technique). This means that most of the "extensions" to NTFS are not really any different to regular files on top of the low-level NTFS format proper.

So, in actually fact all "versions" of NTFS pretty much can interoperate, but since the older NT versions don't know how up update all the extensions, this version number more-or-less forces the volume to be mounted read-only by older operating systems.

Now, most of the extensions that cause this to happen are optional.

For instance, Windows 2000 introduced the NTFS change journal, which is a file that contains notes of what files on a volume have been altered. This is an optional thing that allows file-level change replication to be more efficient. Now, if a Windows 2000 system mounts an NT4 NTFS volume, it won't have the journal file, and it will stay as NT4. If a program creates a change journal on the volume, the Windows 2000 NTFS driver will  create the journal file and bump the version number, and after that the volume will require Windows 2000 to be mountable read-write.

The upshot of this is that I'm not really aware of any downside to formatting NTFS volumes to be NT4 or Windows 2000 compatible when they are empty, and I'd expect gdisk to probably use NT4 by default (although my intuitions on such matters are sometimes wrong) since there's basically no reason to do anything else.

[ Pretty much the only reason for even having the switch is that some users - the kind of big customers who pay for maintenance - require our tools to produce results that are almost literally byte-for-byte identical to whatever the Microsoft tools included with any platform do. If Microsoft's tools have bumped their default, we need to have a switch that can produce the same result. ]
 
 
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NightOwl
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Re: gdisk and ntfs version compatibility
Reply #2 - Sep 18th, 2007 at 9:37am
 
To anyone

Okay, so the question was asked--and nbree has given an answer--but....is there a utility, tool, or *system* report that tells us what version of NTFS has been installed on our partitions?
 

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nbree
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Re: gdisk and ntfs version compatibility
Reply #3 - Sep 18th, 2007 at 4:12pm
 
NightOwl wrote on Sep 18th, 2007 at 9:37am:
is there a utility, tool, or *system* report that tells us what version of NTFS has been installed on our partitions?

Windows XP and above can tell you this through "fsutil": here's a guide with more elaborate instructions for older editions.

fsutil's kinda handy - there's a lot of nice command-line tools in XP, like a grep in the form of "findstr".
 
 
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besonen
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Re: gdisk and ntfs version compatibility
Reply #4 - Sep 19th, 2007 at 2:51pm
 
Quote:
NightOwl wrote on Sep 18th, 2007 at 9:37am:
is there a utility, tool, or *system* report that tells us what version of NTFS has been installed on our partitions?

Windows XP and above can tell you this through "fsutil": here's a guide with more elaborate instructions for older editions.


i just checked two (gdisk created) NTFS partitions with fsutil.

both were detected as version 3.1 even though one of them was explicitly created with the /NTFS:2000 parameter.  one was created without a version being specified (i.e., just /NTFS).

i did connect the hard drive (in an external enclosure via usb) to a windows xp system with no NTFS features found beyond v3.0 enabled.  and there was no deliberate writing done to the /NTFS:2000 partition.

i wonder if windows xp automatically changed the version number even though no features beyond those found in NTFS v3.0 (/NTFS:2000) were enabled on the windows xp system?
 
 
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besonen
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Re: gdisk and ntfs version compatibility
Reply #5 - Sep 19th, 2007 at 3:40pm
 
besonen wrote on Sep 19th, 2007 at 2:51pm:
i wonder if windows xp automatically changed the version number even though no features beyond those found in NTFS v3.0 (/NTFS:2000) were enabled on the windows xp system?



this link would seem to indicate that NTFS "old" version are immediately auto-upgraded regardless of any other details:

http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/file/ntfs/verCompat-c.html

"Windows 2000 Automatic Conversion: Windows 2000 will automatically convert to NTFS 5.0 any NTFS 1.1 file systems it sees when it boots. Even well after the operating system has been installed, if you add an NTFS 1.1 partiton to a Windows 2000 system, it will be converted to NTFS 5.0. This can cause problems, as mentioned above, on systems that boot to both Windows NT and Windows 2000. In some circumstances it may be better to avoid using NTFS under Windows 2000 to avoid this situation."


i would love to know how to disable NTFS auto-upgrading.
 
 
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nbree
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Re: gdisk and ntfs version compatibility
Reply #6 - Sep 20th, 2007 at 4:50pm
 
Yeah, looks like I misremembered that detail - reading all the KB articles reminded me of some of the confusion at the time. NT4SP4 mounts the Win2k NTFS variant, and since NT4 was a pretty wretched bugfest the service packs really weren't optional; it may have been that Microsoft decided that virtually no-one running NT4 wouldn't have SP4 (and they'd be right) they could get away with just forcing the upgrade.
 
 
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