I have just bought a new PC and fitted a drive full of mp3 files that
I was using in my old PC. The old PC was running Windows ME and I
formatted the drive on that machine in NTFS. The new PC is running
Windows XP and when I try to play songs via iTunes or Windows Media
player, the songs continually 'clip' every few seconds. The tech
support people tell me that even though the drive was formatted
correctly in NTFS, because I used a machine running Windows ME to do
it, it will not have the same access rate as when I try to use it on a
Windows XP machine.
They tell me the only solution is to reformat the drive again via the
XP system. But the drive has 80GB of files on it and I would have to
buy a whole new drive to back it up to do that.

Do you know of any other way round this problem please?

Thank you very much.

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Request for Question Clarification by legolas-ga on 16 Jan 2005 07:58 PST

Can you tell me 'how' you formatted a drive as NTFS in WinME? WinME
provides **NO** support for NTFS. Therefore, unless you used a
third-party utility (like partitionmagic, etc), you would be UNABLE to
format as NTFS in WinME. I'd suspect that it has more to do with the
fact that your computer is 6 years old (assumption from the fact that
you had WinME preinstalled) than the filesystem.

Other big possibility, spyware, adware, etc.. that is slowing your box
down. NTFS or not, I'd be hard-pressed to come up with a logical
reason why it would cause clipping on the music considering FAT16 can
play MP3's just fine (and FAT16 is a slow beast of a file system).

Legolas-ga

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Request for Question Clarification by legolas-ga on 18 Jan 2005 10:21 PST

I'm still curious though.. Can you tell me the exact steps you used
(and the software you used) to format as NTFS in ME?

Legolas-ga

That doesn't seem right. I don't think Windows Me even supported NTFS.

Vladimir

I did some reaserch on this as I have never even touched ME I wouldn't
if you payed me. But it seems that you can't directly run a ntfs
format on Windows ME.

Windows 95, 98, and Me clients cannot read NTFS partitions directly.
The ability to read file allocation tables other than the Microsoft
FAT or FAT 32 was never built in. This affects you if you choose to
dual boot between a Windows 95, 98, or Me operating system and a
Windows NT-based operating system, such as NT 4.0, 2000, or XP.

http://kb.indiana.edu/data/acsb.html?cust=3338970.5784.131

Am I correct in assuming that you *had* Windows ME and did an Upgrade
to Windows XP and then converted? That would make sense.

What can happen when you convert from FAT32 (ME's file system) to NTFS
is that the special file that is used to locate data in NTFS, known as
the "Master File Table" can become fragmented. This can impact
performance when accessing files that have their entries split accross
these fragments.

The MFT is like an index. Files themselves that are fragmented have
multiple MFT entries - one for each piece of the file. If the MFT is
also split up it causes pauses when reading files. In the case of MP3s
these pauses are large enougth to affect the decoding.

Windows XP in-built defragmenter can't defragment the MFT (It shows up
as the green section along with some other special files).  There are,
however, third party utilities available that can. Can't think of one
of the top of my head though...

AntiDragon.

Hi there

To clarify:
I had a PC that was running Windows ME, and I formatted the drive in
NTFS with that machine.
Then I got a new PC which runs Windows XP and put the new drive inside
the new machine.
If I check the info about the drive, it correctly shows that it was
formatted in NTFS, but when I play my mp3s from it, it makes little
skips all the way through. When I play the same mp3s copied onto the
new PCs own HD, they are fine.
The tech support guy at Dell told me that Windows ME's NTFS formatting
of the drive would be slightly different to Window's XPs and hence the
problem.

I guess there's no answer expect to back up the 80gb of files
somewhere and reformat the drive via the XP system!

Thanks for trying to help! At least we have all learned something :-)