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SmugdadFlag for United States of America

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Converting ntfs 3.0 to 3.1???

I've got 10 win Vista machines to upgrade to 7.   One went perfectly.  The rest keep throwing "incompatible ntfs " messages and won't upgrade.   Running 'fsutil' shows all 9 as having ntfs ver.  3.0, not 3.1.

I really don't want to do 9 fresh installs with all the software and personalizations.  I can't find any way to convert the file system and have looked hard.  I read this morning that an xp pro setup will do that upgrade, so wonder if a dual boot setup might work, then nuke the xp folders and fix the BCD.  Any ideas??  I might add that the original profiles were all W2K, and over the years were moved to Vista.  HDs have been cloned with Western Digital software so the disks are now all less than 18 months old.  I don't know how Vista didn't install 3.1 but that's a mystery.   I did try the system image and restore trick onto a new 3.1 format but restoring the image made it a 3.0 again.  

Any ideas are greatly appreciated!!
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Scott C
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I'd just do the fresh installs.  Back up the data and begin the process. It's going to take the same amount of time anyways with the 300+ updates that are going to have to be installed.

This way you will have clean, stable machines that are likely to give you less troubles in the future.
I fully agree to above. Aside from formatting, I don't know of a way to get to NTFS 3.1. Of course you could restore the image ujsing a file restore mode onto the newly formatted disks, and then perform the Vista -> W7 upgrade.
Restoring the image as such will of course also restore the file system, which is NTFS 3.0.
There are plenty of disk utilities that will allow to convert partitions to different formats. Could you perhaps convert NTFS->FAT32 then FAT32->NTFS? If the utility is new enough, it should facilitate the newer NTFS version.
Clean install is the way to go.  Why take the chance that a remnant from Vista will be part of the upgraded system that may at a most inconvenient time reveal itself?

It is likely the drives are suffciently old, using replacement drives/SSD onto which windows 7 is installed with the old vista drive as an extra in the system from which the data can be copied.....
According to this: http://superuser.com/questions/495923/are-there-any-changes-or-additions-to-ntfs-in-windows-8

XP used NTFS 3.1, so if it's showing NTFS 3.0 it sounds like your disk imaging software somehow corrupted the versioning table.

One possibility would be the one suggested by Chris Millard....convert the partition to FAT32, do the upgrade, then convert back.  You'll lose all the permissions.

As others stated, best to backup, wipe and reload.
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I know you all are giving me good advice and thank you all for your efforts.  What do you think about saving one with all our software as an image, savings each users 'user profile' on a backup disk and installing 7 from the image?  That would save hours.
Cloning should work. What I would suggest is cloning to a spare hard drive if you have one - you don't want to overwrite a currently working drive until you've performed a successful test.
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Adam Leinss
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We had one machine with 3.1.  I can't recall why it does and the rest don't but it's got Win7 and all our software loaded and working.  I'll make an image of it and try that.  Back later!