Is there a new ver. of NTFS in Win2K over that used in WinNT 4.0 w SP6. I took a drive with an NTFS file system from an NT 4.0 (Service Pack 6) system, hooked it up on a Win2K system to copy some files and now on the winNT system I can't do a CHKDSK... says the file system ver is newer & incompatible with the ver. of CHKDSK. Worked before. Did Win2K alter this drive, even though it never wrote data to it? Is there anything I can do to un-alter the drive or update WinNT so it will work with the drive now? Will I have other problems besides not being able to run CHKDSK?? Thanks for any help.

Win2k uses NTFS5 while WinNT uses NTFS4

When W2K finds an earlier (NT4) version of ntfs it automaticaly converts it to ntfs5 (the version in W2K).

Consequence would appear to be that NT4 chkdsk will not work with it...

In theory u need to have NT-SP4 or later to access (read\write?) the ntfs5 version; which you seem to already have.

I don't believe there is anyway to restore ntfs5 back to ntfs4...

As I understand it, the automatic conversion only occurs if the partition is physically located within a W2K system; not across a LAN etc.

Possibly adding SP6a will remove any other irritations, but I'm not aware of any.

Hello John,

I had the same problem as you when trying to run chkdsk on NT4.

I got round it by putting in the Windows 2000 CD into my machine, and then instead of installing it I selected repair, and then console mode.

I then just typed chkdsk which ran okay, and then exited out, and booted up NT4 again. I could then defrag that volume again.

Have you tried that ?. If not, http://www.sysinternals.com has a tool called ntfschk which enables you to do it in NT4.

Regards,

Lee.