How to Convert NTFS to FAT

Video Transcript

"Hi, my name is Dave Andrews. Today I'm going to show you how to convert NTFS to FAT. My computer's turn off right now and I'm basically going to boot it into safe mode with a command prompt that will allow me to run a format command to change my NTFS file system to FAT 32. So let's just boot my computer here and as Windows starts to boot, in order to get to safe mode, you have to press the F8 key. So I'm basically going to tell it to boot Windows and press an F8, I get this menu right here and this menu allows me to choose to boot to safe mode with command prompt and that is the option I'm going to use. It might take a couple of minutes for your computer to boot up in the safe prompt, safe mode with a command prompt. So once your computer comes up you're going to be presented with a command LAN prompt, which is this space click is blinking prompt right here. It's going to tell you up here in the upper right hand side that you're in safe mode. Now the command that we want to run is a format command and I need to tell you that you need to backup your system as best as you can, get your files and programs over there on some external media because you know, you could run into problems while this format is going through so it's a great idea just to backup your files before you do this. But the command you need to run is format and then you give a drive letter, I'm going to do my c: space and then a forward leaning slash fs which is short for file system and the a colon and then FAT 32 replace. Now this command right here, format c: file system or slash file system: FAT 32 replace, if I was to press enter now, it will go through my c drive and convert my NTFS drive to a FAT 32 drive and you need to keep in mind that there's several limitations that FAT has as oppose to NTFS. It can handle drives up to certain size. You'll also lose a little bit of security when you do that. So make sure you have a backup and make sure this is something that you want to do before you execute that command. My name is Dave Andrews and I've just showed you how to convert NTFS to FAT."