You Can't Play The Witcher 2 On a Non-NTFS HDD

[vansau]

You Can't Play The Witcher 2 On a Non-NTFS HDD

If you were planning to play The Witcher 2 on a FAT32 hard drive, I hope you've got another drive to install it to.

Now that The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings is out (and <a href=http://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/the-witcher-2-assassins-of-kings>earning near-universal praise), there are likely going to be a lot of people playing it this weekend. However, before you install the game on your PC, be sure you have an NTFS hard drive to install the game to.

The PC system requirements tell players that they need 16 GB of disc space, but it doesn't list a specific drive format. A Joystiq reader contacted the site after he found his hard drive didn't work with the game: "My only hard drive with any storage space left on it is FAT32, and has resisted attempts to reformat. I discovered this hidden system requirement after buying The Witcher 2, downloading it, and attempting to install it this morning."

Joystiq contacted CD Project about the issue, and the company's community manager Andrzej Kwiatkowski confirmed the requirement. "Yes, we can confirm that The Witcher 2 on Windows systems only works on NTFS-formatted drives," Kwiatkowski explained. "FAT32 can't handle any file bigger than 4GB, and one of TW2's files has the size of 9GB."

Now that it's been explained, the requirement makes sense. However, I'm sure plenty of PC gamers would've appreciated the warning being listed on the game's box; especially if they already bought it.

Source: Joystiq

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[Treblaine]

I've built my own PC and I have no idea about this distinction.

How do I know if my drive is NTFS or FAT-32?!?!

Vista enough??

EDIT: thanks so much for the responses guys, I suggest before you feel like answering this question in a reply you see who as already replied to me in this thread.

 

[Orloran]

Just making an NTFS partition should get you over the problem. Just choose your installation folder in the right partition.

Edit: if there are some people here who need to know how to solve this problem. I can post some screen-shots how to easily do this in Vista and Windows 7. For most people this shouldn't be a problem though because FAT32 is outdated and not often used any more. Some external HD are known to still ship in FAT32 though.

The solution to this problem.

Spoiler: Quick and Dirty Guide to Making an NTFS Partition.

I've made this in about 10 minutes for those few (poor) people who do happen to still have FAT32.
(Windows 7 and Vista)
First go to Control Panel.
Then click Administrative Tools.
Computer Management

This window will open

Go to Storage > disk Managament
You will here see your disks and partitions. Take a partition that still has enough space left to install 'The Witcher 2'. Shrink the volume, about 20 or 30Gib should be enough I guess. I really don't know how much space the Witcher 2 would take. After shrinking you are going to select the newly unallocated space on your HD drive and partition it in NTFS. The wizzard is really easy for this. Go next until you see this screen.

Now just make sure you have NTFS selected
Also Quick Format. That's it.

 

[googleback]

right... so what the hell do they suggest? importing one?

why the fuck didn't they mention this beforehand? I'm cancelling my order. I'm not buying a new hard drive for one game! however much I want it.

EDIT: Nevermind! mine is NTFS. every other hard drive I have is FAT32 mind. just not the Internal one which is for the best here!

false alarm!

 

[EHKOS]

Pfft who even uses FAT32 anymore? and to Treblaine, I have no idea how you managed to build your own computer without knowing that.

 

[MrBrightside919]

Well my computer apparently isn't powerful enough to run this game anyways...

...but hidden requirements isn't cool

 

[teh_gunslinger]

I'm sorry, but who in their right mind uses FAT32 these days?

I've built my own PC and I have no idea about this distinction.

How do I know if my drive is NTFS or FAT-32?!?!

Vista enough??

If memory serves Vista only does NTFS so there should be no problem.

 

[DeusEternus]

Yeah well you don't actually have to buy a new drive for that, you can just convert fat32 to ntfs from WinXP and up, if you want to (I don't really see why you would want to have a fat32 formatted drive nowadays anyway). Just run "CONVERT C: /FS:NTFS" where C: should/could be changed to the drive you actually want to convert.

Also: you can just tell if your drive is already NTFS (most are) by rightclicking your drive in My Computer, and check the properties. It should say on the General tab what filesystem is has been formatted with.

 

[mireko]

right... so what the hell do they suggest? importing one?

why the fuck didn't they mention this beforehand? I'm cancelling my order. I'm not buying a new hard drive for one game! however much I want it.

You don't need to buy a new hard drive. Either reformat your FAT32 to NTFS or make a new partition like Orloran mentioned.

Your HDD is probably already NTFS anyway.

 

[teh_gunslinger]

right... so what the hell do they suggest? importing one?

why the fuck didn't they mention this beforehand? I'm cancelling my order. I'm not buying a new hard drive for one game! however much I want it.

Provided you are using Windows XP or better you are already running NTFS. So there are no problem. This is not a hidden requirement.

 

[devotedsniper]

I've built my own PC and I have no idea about this distinction.

How do I know if my drive is NTFS or FAT-32?!?!

Vista enough??

Basically if you have XP, Vista or Win7 you run NTFS by default (pretty sure vista and 7 only allow you to format in NTFS for the OS partition anyway).

On the other hand who seriously still uses FAT32 other than on pendrives? NTFS has been the standard for windows operating systems for years now..

 

[The_root_of_all_evil]

I've built my own PC and I have no idea about this distinction.

How do I know if my drive is NTFS or FAT-32?!?!

Vista enough??

Click on My Computer, and the left bottom part of the window will tell you the file formatting system used for each drive when you click on them.

Most should be NTFS unless you're running 95/98/3.1.

 

[Aardvark Soup]

This is quite a bad thing, actually. A lot of people will probably end up being unable to play the game, without knowing what the problem. And even if they do they will need to go through the trouble of reformatting their hard drive or adding a partition first.

Why the hell would they even need a single 9 GB file? And why don't they just split it up in three parts? In my opinion: this is nothing more than a bug that can easily be fixed.

 

[Orekoya]

I've built my own PC and I have no idea about this distinction.

How do I know if my drive is NTFS or FAT-32?!?!

Vista enough??

Uh... NTFS and FAT-32 are the format file system of the drive, if you built your own computer you would have had to format the drive before installing the OS. That's like saying I can build an car engine but I don't know what oil it will use.

 

[Covarr]

A 9GB file? Yeah, filesystems are overrated. Let's just stream everything from a single file, like we would from a SNES cartridge twenty years ago.

Seriously, this is such a noob mistake.

P.S. Thanks

 

[Lord_Gremlin]

Ah PC gaming. I would buy this game for PS3 though.

 

[DeusEternus]

This is quite a bad thing, actually. A lot of people will probably end up being unable to play the game, without knowing what the problem. And even if they do they will need to go through the trouble of reformatting their hard drive or adding a partition first.

Why the hell would they even need a single 9 GB file? And why don't they just split it up in three parts? In my opinion: this is nothing more than a bug that can easily be fixed.

That would have been a better solution from the developers side, since there probably isn't a good reason it can't be split into multiple files.

Regardless, the likelyhood of encountering a FAT32 drive is pretty low nowadays, since we tend to have harddrives larger than 32gb, which FAT32 doesn't really support.

 

[RA92]

I've built my own PC and I have no idea about this distinction.

How do I know if my drive is NTFS or FAT-32?!?!

Vista enough??

Actually, when you format a drive, they give you the option to make it either FAT32 or NTFS.

 

[Virgil]

I'm sorry, but who in their right mind uses FAT32 these days?

People on Macs that also run Windows via Bootcamp frequently use FAT32 partitions, as it's the only file system able to be written to by both operating systems. A common setup is a small partition for both operating systems, and the remainder of the drive as FAT32.

A better question is why any developer would think using 9GB data files is a good idea. There's no way that file is anything but an archive of smaller bits of data, and there's no good reason why it shouldn't be broken up. If only for performance reasons, if nothing else.