I needed to convert the the filesystem of one of friends old system from FAT32 to NTFS. So I fired up the command:

If you look at the command, I had given the -v switch, which basically convert in verbose mode. To my discomfort, this one little switch had cost me 3 hours.

Normally a conversion usually takes anywhere between 5 to 15 min for a normal (10 ~ 20 GB partition) but it took almost 3 hours to finish this conversion. Because the utility was outputting the filename of each and every file on the partition.

During this conversion, I found out that there were 144,000 files in the System Restore Folder of that partition, even though the space taken was not much.

This prompted me to recover this space from the system restore. After searching for a while, I found that to remove the files in your system restore folder, all you have to do is switch off the system restore on that drive / partition. You can switch it on after few minutes.

So the morale of the story is make sure you clean up your system restore folder before doing any sort of conversion, and do not use the verbose option.