Man page 8 : mkntfs

• -f, --fast, -Q, --quick
      Perform quick (fast) format. This will skip both zeroing of the volume and bad sector checking.
• -L, --label STRING
      Set the volume label for the filesystem.
• -C, --enable-compression
      Enable compression on the volume.
• -n, --no-action
      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.

• -c, --cluster-size BYTES
      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 uses 4096 bytes as the default cluster size.

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).

• -s, --sector-size BYTES
      Specify the size of sectors in bytes. Valid sector size values are 256, 512, 1024, 2048 and 4096 bytes per sector. If omitted,

mkntfs attempts to determine the sector-sizeautomatically and if that fails a default of 512 bytes per sector is used.

• -p, --partition-start SECTOR
      Specify the partition start sector. The maximum is 4294967295 (2^32-1). If omitted,

mkntfs attempts to determine part-start-sectautomatically and if that fails a default of 0 is used. Note that part-start-sectis required for Windows to be able to boot from the created volume.

• -H, --heads NUM
      Specify the number of heads. The maximum is 65535 (0xffff). If omitted,

mkntfs attempts to determine the number of headsautomatically and if that fails a default of 0 is used. Note that headsis required for Windows to be able to boot from the created volume.

• -S, --sectors-per-track NUM
      Specify the number of sectors per track. The maximum is 65535 (0xffff). If omitted,

mkntfs attempts to determine the number of sectors-per-trackautomatically and if that fails a default of 0 is used. Note that sectors-per-trackis required for Windows to be able to boot from the created volume.

• -z, --mft-zone-multiplier NUM
      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:
• -T, --zero-time
      Fake the time to be 00:00:00 UTC, Jan 1, 1970 instead of the current system time. This is only really useful for debugging purposes.
• -I, --no-indexing
      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.)
• -F, --force
      Force

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

• -q, --quiet
      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
      Verbose execution.
• --debug
      Really verbose execution; includes the verbose output from the

-v option as well as additional output useful for debugging

mkntfs.

• -V, --version
      Print the version number of

mkntfs and exit.

• -l, --license
      Print the licensing information of

mkntfs and exit.

• -h, --help
      Show a list of options with a brief description of each one.