P3D Re: NTSF/FAT

[roberts@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (John W Roberts)]

>Date: Wed, 1 Apr 1998 16:31:23 -0700
>From: ron labbe <ron@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
>Subject: P3D NTSF/FAT

>(I tried to post to SD-3d at sd-3d@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, but unsuccessful! Bob?)

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>>>NTFS formatted drives are only accesible from NT. You can not access data
>>>on a drive formatted this way with Win95, OS/2 or DOS.
>>
>>That is not true...
>>I have a Win 95 computer networked to an NT computer and each can access
>>ALL of the other's files... 

I remain *extremely* skeptical of this as a piece of evidence. Analogy:
  Jim Bob lives in Tuscaloosa, his friend Vladimir lives in Petrograd. They've
  never met, but they have a mutual friend Hubert, who commutes between
  Tuscaloosa and Petrograd every week, and Jim Bob and Vladimir are always
  passing friendly verbal messages to one another, conveyed by Hubert. Another
  friend of Vladimir, Spencer, happens to visit Jim Bob, and Jim Bob mentions
  his many interesting conversations with Vladimir, and Spencer asks, "How
  can you have conversations with Vladimir? He only speaks Russian!".
  "Nonsense," replies Jim Bob, "I talk with him all the time, and he always
  speaks English!"
  [Solution to the mystery: Vladimir only speaks Russian, but Hubert speaks
  both English and Russian. When Hubert conveys the verbal messages, he
  translates the messages to the appropriate language, without bothering to
  mention that it's a translation. Jim Bob has never heard Vladimir speak,
  only Hubert, but he thinks of the words as being those of Vladimir.]

Relevance of the analogy: You stated that the two computers are *networked*
together, which introduces some considerable number of transmission/translation
protocols between the two machines. When you access the NT computer's files
over the network from the Win95 computer, it's really the NT computer that's
accessing the files and passing them on.

>Sid herbage adds:

>>The original message was slightly misleading. Although it's true that an NT
>>drive, formatted NTFS is not accessible from Win95, DOS et al, NT
>>doesn't *have* to be installed as NTFS. Optionally it can be installed as
>>FAT16
>>in which case it can be seen from a FAT16 system.
>>
>>I have DOS/win31, Win95 and WinNT installed in 3 independent partitions
>>handled by a boot manager, and I specifically installed NT (and win95 OSR2
>>come to that .... it could be installed as FAT32) as FAT 16 so that each can
>>talk to the others' partitions.

>My NT hard drives ARE NTFS and my Win95 computer can access all files
>without a problem!

As I said, that's no test. Try taking an NTFS disk out of your NT computer
and physically installing it as a slave drive in your Win95 machine, turn the
network off, and see if you can still access those files on the NTFS
disk using Win95. If it were a disk from another Win95 machine, you *would*
be able to access those files, but I suspect you won't be able to
access the NTFS disk. (No, I don't suggest you really try it, but I did
that exact thing one time to try to recover some files a guest researcher
had left behind, and it indeed did not work. We had to put the disk in an
NT machine to get the files.)

>Dan Shelley writes:
>> If your NT drive is
>>strictly NTFS, it will not be accessible from the other operating
>>systems. As Sid said, you can even have multiple operating systems on
>>the same drive.

>So? This STILL ain't true, Dan and Sid! (Luckily!)

It still ain't true if you're talking about two machines, connected by a
network, running different operating systems simultaneously, but that's
*not* what these other guys are talking about. Around here some people have
network mounting of disks between Win95 machines with only IDE interface,
and Sun machines running Unix (SunOS) on SCSI disks. Are you suggesting a 
person could pop a SCSI/Unix formatted disk from a Sun into Win95 / IDE 
machine, and expect to access the files without an intermediary? :-)  :-)  :-)

John R


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