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Is there a tool/utility under any operating system, or standalone bootable disk image that can convert a filesystem/partition/volume from NTFS to exFAT?

  • NTFS is the native filesystem of modern versions of Microsoft Windows.
  • exFAT is a successor to the FAT and FAT32 filesystems that originated with DOS. It does not have the 4 gigabyte maximum file size limit of FAT32.
  • exFAT is supported by modern versions of Windows and Mac OS X and is gaining support on more devices.

My use case is converting a 1TB external hard drive previously shared between a couple of Windows systems to now share between both Windows and Mac systems. Other use cases surely exist.

exFAT does not support as much metadata as NTFS. That's fine. The tool should endeavour to preserve as much metadata as accurately as exFAT can support. It should preserve the metadata better than just copying the directory structure via the OS.

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    No there is no utility...superuser.com/questions/240928/…
    – Moab
    May 21, 2016 at 3:55
  • Can you temporarilly copy the data off of the device, format it to exFAT, and then copy the data back? Apr 18, 2017 at 7:49
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    @Mawg: As alluded to in my final sentence, I was worried that copying would change too much of the metadata, such as changing some timestamps to the times of the copying. May 8, 2017 at 3:03
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    IC IC - the use some cloning s/w to do the copying? S/w designed for cloning should preserve the metadata May 8, 2017 at 7:39

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If you don't mind losing that data, In Windows, open Command Prompt (elevated), then type diskpart. It should open the tool, and you can type list disk. It will list disks by number. Type select disc X, where X is a number. Type clean, then format fs=EXFAT. Type assign, then type exit. It should now be correctly formatted to EXFAT. If you don't want to lose data, I'm sorry. I wouldn't have an answer there.

Edit: changed Fat32 to exfat

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