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I have a flash drive that I'd like to format for use in Windows. I would like support for symbolic links, so I can't use FAT/FAT32/exFAT.

I would prefer to use the ext4 filesystem and disable journaling, with the Ext2Fsd filesystem driver, but have (so far) found that I can't make soft links across filesystems that Windows will read, Ext2Fsd has an annoying bug about always mounting partitions as read-only and has problems resuming from sleep, and some programs have problems writing to the partition even after manually configuring Ext2Fsd to allow writes.

So, I would like to use NTFS for the flash drive, but disable the journaling feature (causes extra writes), if possible. How can I do this?

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    Could you make a normal NTFS filesystem, but disable journaling on the host machine? like twcenter.net/forums/showthread.php?t=240274
    – sep332
    Dec 6, 2012 at 18:33
  • Downvote: Anyone care to explain why?
    – palswim
    Dec 6, 2012 at 19:08
  • @sep332: Nice find. You should put that in an answer!
    – palswim
    Dec 6, 2012 at 19:33

3 Answers 3

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I don't know of any tools to create an NTFS filesystem without a journal, but you can delete the journal after you make the filesystem. On Windows, open an administrator command prompt and type:

fsutil usn deletejournal /d c:

Where c: is the drive you want to remove the journal from.

As you might expect, there are some dangers involved with this: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc788042%28v=ws.10%29.aspx

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    This answer is incorrect. That command deletes the USN journal ($Extend\$UsnJrnl), not the NTFS journal ($LogFile).
    – benrg
    Jul 8, 2016 at 9:09
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You cannot. Neither Ntfs.sys on Windows nor NTFS-3g on Linux allow disabling specific filesystem features.

On the other hand, I've been using NTFS on my flash pendrive for over 4 years and it's still working perfectly – journalling has even saved my data a few times.

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Actually as of Windows 10 23h something when I formatted my 32gb brand new sandisk as NTFS (for home videos on a roku that still stubbornly refuses any exfat support) I ran that command:

fsutil usn deletejournal /d d:

and it returned:

error: the volume change journal is not active

It seems Windows has started disabling journaling by default on a format of a removable device, pretty smart choice, hopefully that includes disabling permissions since I don't think my mother can handle having to run commands or edit permissions just to watch an old home movie in digital glory on her roku TV.

How to fix this behavior?

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    This does not really answer the question. If you have a different question, you can ask it by clicking Ask Question. To get notified when this question gets new answers, you can follow this question. Once you have enough reputation, you can also add a bounty to draw more attention to this question. - From Review Dec 14, 2023 at 6:32
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    As mentioned under the other topic, the USN journal is not the same thing as the filesystem journal. (One is for maintaining filesystem integrity, the other is for apps to monitor changes.) Dec 14, 2023 at 9:51

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