In this unintentional continuing series of complaints about Windows, today I vent a little bit about NTFS. I’ve spent most of the last couple of days recovering a system from a hard drive crash. Fortunately I had already made backups of everything important and I actually had confidence that I could get the system back up in the usual manner. Boot the Windows set up CD then open the Recovery console, etc…
As you can guess, this did not transpire. Instead the machine froze on every attemp to get to the Recovery console. And, btw, Disk Doctor from emergency floppies doesn’t do NTFS. Lovely, so when an NTFS formatted disk bites the big one, that’s just it for all practical purposes. At least I haven’t yet found an alternate utility to fix an NTFS disk from the command prompt. Now there are things to like about NTFS, like smaller cluster sizes on large disks and user permissions, but for most users, being able to fix it when it breaks may take precedence. Right now, I’m definitely thinking about some alternatives. But alas, I fear I have no practical alternatives, at least professionally…
Enough venting, back to work!