Windows 7: How to convert my partition back to NTFS from extFS?

Hello,
I had a Windows 7 installation, x64 and recently I installed windows XP, quit Windows 7 for a while. I have a big problem, I have a 160GB SATA2 Maxtor HDD, I first formatted/part'ed when I had installed windows7, and now being back to my xp I cannot browse the partition, the driver letter appears but I cannot access the information, i put the drive in another computer running Windows 7 and all the data was accessible. I tried like a ton of part. managers and no luck so far. If anyone kows



My question is how can I convert my partition back to NTFS from extFS or WinFS??

Google didn't helped me at all, it's been 2 days since I am looking for a solution to this, no result on google (or this forum or other forums for that matter) will give me a compatible partition manager/tool or I am unable to find the keywords for it.

THANKS!!

I'm a bit confused, neither extFS or WinFS are among the format options in Disk Management, so how did they get formatted in that fashion at all? If you used a partition manager or some Unix OS to format, then I would use the same to alter it.

This is the problem, I formatted the drive from Administrative Tools Create new extended partition, I am not certain it was extFS or WinFS, I can hardly remember, it was like 5-6 months ago, but the problem is, if the partition IS NTFS, I must be able to recognize it as a bad NTFS partition(that's why i presumed it must some exotic fs type), not Unknown in every Partition Manager, and when put in Windows 7 pc, everything is recognized.
I am really confused.

I just opened my partition's first sector in a hex editor and I see that ACtually it is EXFAT!

Having found the real partition type is much easier!

Here's the XP KB update from microsoft to make such partititions visible under XP

Description of the exFAT file system driver update package

I know about FAT, but I hadn't heard of exFAT before. In general, it is not a good idea to use FAT, because it will cause some problems. The only time that I use FAT is on a volume that I want to accesss by both Windows and Linux. Otherwise, I can't see any good purpose in it.

You will have to backup your data and do a format->NTFS

You can't convert it

EXFAT is kinda like FAT64, bigger better meaner than FAT32. Anyhow, Windows 7 offered to convert it to that, now that I have installed the addon from micrososift everything is visible and moving as it should.

THANKS VERY MUCH!

Exfat is Extended FAT. Its a new file system that was available in Vista and now 7.

You should be able to either format the drive back to NTFS or goto command line and type convert D: /fs:ntfs

Replace D with whatever drive letter you want to convert.

When I went into Disk Management to check this out, it only had options for NTSF or FAT. Maybe there is an additional step involved if FAT is chosen...I don't know, but if there isn't, I would like to know why? What advantage is there to exFAT over NTSF?

The data structure is more oriented towards easy access of the content. the fs is for large hdd's, and apparently prefered by Windows 7 .... dunno what to say