Written By:
Date Posted: August 27, 2001

There are 3 ways to format your drives into NTFS. Degree of difficulty and convenience will vary, depending on the situation. Your choices are:

1) Format as NTFS before installing Windows 2000
2) Format as NTFS, using Disk Management, in Windows 2000
3) Format as NTFS, in DOS window, in Windows 2000

Format as NTFS before installing Windows 2000

This is probably the easiest time to do it, assuming you're installing Windows from scratch. This will save you the problems of backing up your computer, since it's already cleaned up for a Windows install. Unlike regular formatting, you can't format the drive as NTFS from using a Windows 98 DOS boot disk. You're going to have to start the Windows 2000 install, and go through the first few steps.

Eventually, you'll be presented with the following screens.

Life will be a lot easier to just choose the c: drive to install Windows. Once you've made your choice, you'll be presented with the option of formatting the drive to NTFS. Select it, then continue with the install. Eventually, Windows setup will reboot.

Now, just to let you know, the drive isn't formatted as NTFS right away. It's formatted in FAT16 during the Windows setup. When Windows reboots, it then converts the FAT partition into NTFS.

When Windows setup finishes, we can configure security, which will be explained later on.

Format as NTFS, using Management, in Windows 2000

Let's say that you already have Windows setup, but didn't format it into NTFS, or it wasn't formatted in NTFS when it was given to you. Well, it isn't too late. Using a tool called Disk Management (Disk Administrator in NT), you can format whatever drives, except for CD drives, and your system (\winnt) drive.

If you practice good habits, and setup multiple partitions, you'll save files onto other partitions other than c:. This way, if Windows dies on you, your data is safe. However, this poses problems for you formatting your d:, e:, etc..., partitions in Disk Management. Formatting your drives in this tool will destroy all data on them. I said it once, I'll say it again, do regular backups and you'll be ok. If you don't have access to removable storage, then move all your data to another partition and format each drive one by one. I prefer this method over right clicking a drive in Windows Explorer and selecting format, because Disk Management provides a lot more options and you can see more of what is happening.

To get to Disk Aministrator, simply click on Start, then Settings, Control Panel, then double click Administrative Tools, then double click Computer Management. A new console will appear. Expand the Storage tree, and click on Disk Management.You'll get a window that appears like this:

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