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What is Native Structured Storage?

A. Native Structured Storage or NSS was originally a new feature in Windows 2000 however it has been withdrawn due to problems with other system components.

Native Structured Storage (NSS) was a method to transparently store ActiveX document files in a multi-stream format on NTFS volumes. Since NSS is no longer supported Active X document files are now stored in the normal document file format.

Windows 2000 Beta 3 supplied a utility NSS2DOC.EXE (it is not supplied in newer beta releases) which converts NSS files to normal document file formats. This program is run automatically during upgrade and any problems logged in %systemroot%\setuperr.log.

You can also run manually using:

C:\> NSS2DOC-ca

Normal causes for automatic conversion failure are:

  • Files encrypted using the NTFS encrypted file system (since the account used at setup can not decrypt the files)
  • Files that cannot be written due to their security settings (run NSS2DOC as the user who owns the files to get round this problem)
  • Certain .tmp files, which are not fully flush when written and so may contain no real content

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