How can I disable the Dirty Bit on a FAT32 volume?

amirams

New member
Please note that I DON'T need to disable CHKDSK at boot. What I need is to actually remove the Dirty Bit. I have an external drive that is formatted as FAT32 and I want to convert it to NTFS, but every time I run CONVERT I get a message saying that the disk has the Dirty Bit set and cannot be converted. CHKDSK /F does not solve the problem. I don't get any message asking me to run CHKDSK when I boot or connect the disk, which sort of proves that the disk is not actually dirty. (I always remove the disk using "Safely remove hardware").
 

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Did you try chkdsk /x /f <drive letter of the external:>?

Another option is try the GUI method, right click the drive.
 

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If you have the data on that drive backed up somewhere else you could just delete the partition and start over with a clean slate. Then creat a new partition and format it in NTFS.
 

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If you have the data on that drive backed up somewhere else you could just delete the partition and start over with a clean slate. Then creat a new partition and format it in NTFS.

Unfortunately I don't have an extra 1TB of free storage (give or take...) to backup everything on the drive.

Isn't there a way to simply clear the bit?
 

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OS
Windows 7
Bumping this because I'm in the same situation as this guy... Only mine is not an external but the actual drive containing the OS itself...
 

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OS
Windows 7
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