How to Convert a Hard Drive or Flash Drive from FAT32 to NTFS Format?

If you’ve got a hard drive formatted with the FAT32 file system, you might have found that you can’t copy large files to that drive. So how do you fix that, and convert the file system over to NTFS?

It’s worth noting that FAT32 works just fine on just about any OS, but NTFS is usually read-only on Linux or Mac OS X. the FAT32 file system, which most external drives are still shipped with, can’t handle files larger than about 4 GB in size—which means most full-length movies and anything really large, like a virtual machine.

With just a simple command in Windows, though, you can actually convert a FAT32 drive to NTFS without reformatting entirely (and thus losing all your data). If you want to convert the filesystem without losing your files, just open up a command prompt in administrator mode and then type:

                                              convert G: /FS:NTFS

It'll take awhile, but you won't have to re-copy any of your data or reformat the drive. But, there is no way to convert from NTFS to FAT32—if you want to go back, you'll have to reformat the drive entirely. This trick is still pretty nice, though, as it'll save you from reformatting your drive about half the time.