How can one revert a disk with NTFS to FAT 32 to install older software which won't run on WinXP?

What you asked is actually installation the new Operating System over the existing one.

There is no standard procedure of doing this.

Just copy all your important files (My Documents, etc.) to another logical (or physical) drive. Then format partition in FAT32, or delete and re-create new partition and perform standard procedures of installation Operating System to the newly formatted drive. As long as you successfully installed OS, copy your files back to the drive.

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Read More: Questions and Answers

  1. How do I format a USB Flash Drive to NTFS file system?
  2. How does NTFS compared to FAT32 in Windows XP, and which is faster?
  3. Is it possible to convert a FAT32 Hard Drive to NTFS without losing all data on the drive? I like to change from FAT32 to NTFS, my operating system is Windows XP PRO, how can i do that? Without the lost of my programs?
  4. How can I copy files from a hard drive formatted to NTFS, to a FAT32 hard drive ?
  5. Which version of NTFS is installed on my Windows XP system ?
  6. When I use the following command "FORMAT" on a volume (Windows XP) what is really written on this volume ?
  7. I am using a 249 megabyte drive as a backup drive on my XP system. I have it formatted in NTFS and compressed, yet the size of the drive is still the same as before I compressed it. Why?
  8. The files I place on the compressed drive are only compressed from 1.15MB to 1.14 MB , is it normal this should be only 100kb of compression per MB?
  9. Could I read file from my pc running windows XP with NTFS5 file system, from a machine under windows 95 on the same network?
  11. Which is better? NTFS or NTFS5?
  12. Is the boot limitation for NTFS still 7.87GB?
  13. Where can I get a lot of details about the NTFS encryption and security ?
  14. How do you lock files from other machine users on ntfs file system ?
  15. How do I repair a corrupt master file table?
  16. For Windows 2000 Professional using NTFS -- Must All partitions be NTFS or can a FAT32 partition be functional as well?
  17. How do you format a blank hard disk drive to NTFS or NTFS5 ?
  18. Is there any problem with my games if I installed it under NTFS file system?
  19. When Data is written to the NTFS disk at what position does in start the write? EG Assuming a file has been deleted (and deleted from the recycle bin if applicable) would it first overwrite this file, or would it start at the next totally unused cluster?
  20. When deleting a file at work from a HDD what is the best way to ensure that the file cannot be recovered? ie that the data no longer exists on the drive, rather than just resetting the flag of the relevant file/cluster? Is there any way NTFS will do this? Registry hacks etc. ?
  21. When using compression on a NTFS volume, if the hard drive moves to another PC, can the deleted data still be recovered?
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