MKNTFS(8) manual page

Name

mkntfs - create a NTFS 1.2 (Windows NT/2000/XP) file system

mkntfs [ -s sector-size ] [ -c cluster-size ] [ -L volume-label ] [ -z mft-zone-multiplier ] [ -f | -Q ] [ -n ] [ -q ] [ -v ] [ -vv ] [ -C ] [ -F ] [ -I ] [ -V ] [ -l ] [ -h ] device [ number-of-sectors ]

Description

mkntfs is used to create a NTFS 1.2 (Windows NT 4.0) file system on a device (usually a disk partition). device is the special file corresponding to the device (e.g /dev/hdXX). number-of-sectors is the number of blocks on the device. If omitted, mkntfs automagically figures the file system size.

Options

-s sector-size

Specify the size of sectors in bytes. Valid sector size values are 256, 512, 1024, 2048 and 4096 bytes per sector. If omitted, mkntfs sector-size is determined automatically and if that fails a default of 512 bytes per sector is used.

-c cluster-size

Specify the size of clusters in bytes. Valid cluster size values are powers of two, with at least 256, and at most 65536 bytes per cluster. If omitted, mkntfs cluster-size is determined by the volume size. The value is determined as follows:

Volume	size	Default cluster
0	- 512MB	512 bytes
512MB	- 1GB	1024 bytes
1GB	- 2GB	2048 bytes
2GB	+	4096 bytes

Note that the default cluster size is set to be at least equal to the sector size as a cluster cannot be smaller than a sector. Also, note that values greater than 4096 have the side effect that compression is disabled on the volume (due to limitations in the NTFS compression algorithm currently in use by Windows).

-L volume-label

Set the volume label for the filesystem.

-z mft-zone-multiplier

Set the MFT zone multiplier, which determines the size of the MFT zone to use on the volume. The MFT zone is the area at the beginning of the volume reserved for the master file table (MFT), which stores the on disk inodes (MFT records). It is noteworthy that small files are stored entirely within the inode; thus, if you expect to use the volume for storing large numbers of very small files, it is useful to set the zone multiplier to a higher value. Note, that the MFT zone is resized on the fly as required during operation of the NTFS driver but choosing a good value will reduce fragmentation. Valid values are 1, 2, 3 and 4. The values have the following meaning:

MFT zone	MFT zone size
multiplier	(% of volume size)
1	12.5% (default)
2	25.0%
3	37.5%
4	50.0%

-f

Same as -Q.

-Q

Perform quick format. This will skip both zeroing of the volume and bad sector checking.

-n

Causes mkntfs to not actually create a filesystem, but display what it would do if it were to create a filesystem. All steps of the format are carried out except the actual writing to the device.

-q

Quiet execution; only errors are written to stderr, no output to stdout occurs at all. Useful if mkntfs is run in a script.

-v

Verbose execution.

-vv

Really verbose execution; includes the verbose output from the -v option as well as additional output useful for debugging mkntfs.

-C

Enable compression on the volume.

-F

Force mkntfs to run, even if the specified device is not a block special device, or appears to be mounted.

-I

Disable content indexing on the volume. (This is only meaningful on Windows 2000 and later. Windows NT 4.0 and earlier ignore this as they do not implement content indexing at all.)

-V

Print the version number of mkntfs and exit.

-l

Print the licensing information of mkntfs and exit.

-h

Print the usage information of mkntfs and exit.

Bugs

mkntfs writes the backup boot sector to the last sector of the block device being formatted. However, current versions of the Linux kernel (all versions up to and including todays 2.4.18) either only report an even number of sectors when the sector size is below 1024 bytes, which is the case for most hard drives today (512 bytes sector size) or they return the correct number but accessing the last sector fails. Either way, this means that when a partition has an odd number of 512-byte sectors, the last sector is either not reported to us at all or it is not writable by us and hence the created NTFS volume will either have the backup boot sector placed one sector ahead of where it should be or it cannot be written at all. For this reason, mkntfs marks the NTFS volume dirty, so that when you reboot into Windows, check disk runs automatically and creates a copy of the backup boot sector in the correct location. This also has the benefit of catching any bugs in mkntfs as check disk would find any corrupt structures and repair them, as well as report them. - If you do see any problems reported, please report the messages to the author.
There may be other bugs. Please, report them to the author.

Author

This version of mkntfs has been written by Anton Altaparmakov <aia21@cantab.net> (if that fails, use <antona@users.sourceforge.net>).

Availability

mkntfs is part of the ntfsprogs package and is available for download from http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=13956 in source (tar ball and rpm) and pre-compiled binary (i386 rpm and deb) form.