Installing Windows 11 without 8.3 short file name support

Right, yep. ReFS is nice for large data volumes, virtualization (it's really good for VHDX storage), high-availability, stuff like that. NTFS is still the workhorse file system for Windows. As g-man mentioned, you can boot from ReFS, but I'm not sure why you would.

Maybe not possible from Disk Manager, but it could be possible with a third-party utility. You can test it in a virtual machine. Install Windows 11 in GPT (UEFI boot) and then convert the Windows partition from NTFS to ReFS. Try to boot into Windows and post your results. I won't do it, just out of curiosity.

There is no conversion tool, like a mbr2gpt for ReFS. ReFS doesn't support NTFS alternate data streams, so a lot of file metadata would go missing.

If it is going to screw the file system just to be less vulnerable to errors or whatever, no thanks! I will stay with NTFS forever.

Thank you all for your contributions. They were very instructive and enlightening.

I found the following reg entry in TenForums.com for ReFS file system. I learned from you that I could not convert to ReFS on already-installed Windows. For test purposes anyway, I applied the reg entry and restarted Windows. Windows couldn't restart, of course. This was Windows 11 with stripped 8dot3 short file names on Hyper-V VM and corruption of Windows was not important.

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\MiniNT
AllowRefsFormatOverNonmirrorVolume (DWORD)
(delete MiniNT key) = disable
1 = enable

garlin said:

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Bottom line: Does disabling 8.3 shortnames help performance? Yes, but not until you scale into territory most desktop users don't get into. Unless you're that weird person who likes to keep over 10,000 files in a single folder.

Like a number of Windows tuning suggestions, someone takes a somewhat useful tweak and makes it sound like a miracle cure to your filesystem woes.

Click to expand...

I rest my case. I don't see the point. Truthfully, unless it's something I don't see, I don't have any filesystem woes.

If it ain't broken don't fix it! Listen to the wise old saying.