Convert to FAT to remove NTFS permissions.

[cwk9]

Why convert the entire drive when you could just put ntfsdos.exe on a boot disk and copy the files you need? At least that way there’s no evidence that you were messing with the system. {P²P}Apocalypse is right about the only way to stop some one who has physical access to the machine is to encrypt stuff. As you can see ntfs security is almost as big of a joke as FAT32/16.

[knightmb]

Originally posted here by jaggz
System meltdown? I think you misunderstood the purpose of my post. What I described is a crude method which could be used to gain information from an NTFS drive, ...... a security issue. I would not expect to convert a drive from NTFS to FAT32 and then boot the same OS.

It is apparent from your closing statement of a 4GB FAT partition running a 32bit OS, that you misunderstood the purpose of my original post which was to alert admins etc, of the availability of software which can convert NTFS to other partition types rendering the NTFS security features worthless.

I understood your post, was watching out for others that read your post. It was to warn those who might try it at home and not realize that this process will either destroy the file system, thus you won't have access to any of the files or the system will die and never work again until it's repartitioned or you go in and manually repair the file system. Changing file system formats may/may not work, just wanted to warn those that might try it. Have you ever tried to convert a partition in PQMagic that had 32 Gigabytes or greater or data on it? I've tried with version 7.0 and it bombs the file system. No recovery from this and you lose all the data.

Your info on FAT32 partition size is wrong. The limit is 2 terabytes. I have formatted 100GB drives as FAT32.

Microsoft File System info
http://support.microsoft.com/default...;en-us;Q184006

Yeah, formatting isn't the same as converting is it? Actually, according to Microsoft your wrong also since they state it will work up to 8 terabytes. I've only formatted drives at 4 terabytes just for fun here in the lab, we haven't had anything bigger come by yet. I don't think a 100GB HDD is a good way to back up a claim about partition sizes is it?

[mohaughn]

There are a lot easier ways to do this.

Get a floppy version of linux and use the NTFS file system utility. From there you can actually just crack passwords, and get the login to the machine. It is also possible to change passwords this way, assuming the admin has not gone way beyond most in hardening the system.

Pull the drive and put it in another system, or put another drive in this system, load NT on the new drive. Then you can just change the permissions however you like via NT.

NTFS is not intended to secure your system against someone who has physical access to the machine. No file system that does not use some type of PKI encryption will prevent someone who has physical access from seeing the data. MS or otherwise.