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convert is an external command first introduced with Windows 2000. [2] If the drive cannot be locked (for example, the drive is the system volume or the current drive) the command gives the option to convert the drive the next time the computer is restarted.
A block, a contiguous number of bytes, is the minimum unit of storage that is read from and written to a disk by a disk driver.The earliest disk drives had fixed block sizes (e.g. the IBM 350 disk storage unit (of the late 1950s) block size was 100 six-bit characters) but starting with the 1301 [8] IBM marketed subsystems that featured variable block sizes: a particular track could have blocks ...
NTFS read/write support is available on Linux and BSD using NTFS3 in Linux and NTFS-3G in BSD. [15] [16] NTFS uses several files hidden from the user to store metadata about other files stored on the drive which can help improve speed and performance when reading data. [1]
A basic data partition can be formatted with any file system, although most commonly BDPs are formatted with the NTFS, exFAT, or FAT32 file systems. To programmatically determine which file system a BDP contains, Microsoft specifies that one should inspect the BIOS Parameter Block that is contained in the BDP's Volume Boot Record .
With this option, Format writes bootstrap code to the first sector of the volume (and possibly elsewhere as well). Format always writes a BIOS Parameter Block to the first sector, with or without the /S option. Another option (/Q) allows for what Microsoft calls "Quick Format". With this option the command will not perform steps 2 and 3 above.
Mount points can be created in a directory on an NTFS file system, which gives a reference to the root directory of the mounted volume. Any empty directory can be converted to a mount point. The mounted volume is not limited to the NTFS filesystem but can be formatted with any file system supported by Microsoft Windows.
The minimum cache size is 250 MB. In Vista or with FAT32 formatting of the drive, the maximum is 4 GB. In Windows 7 or later with NTFS or exFAT formatting, the maximum cache size is 32 GB per device. Windows Vista allows only one device to be used, while Windows 7 allows multiple caches, one per device, up to a total of 256 GB. [5]
The ntfs.sys released with Windows Vista made the functionality available to user mode applications by default. Since NTFS 3.1, a symbolic link can also point to a file or remote SMB network path. While NTFS junction points support only absolute paths on local drives, the NTFS symbolic links allow linking using relative paths.