Re: Fat 32, win98, and yarn.

From: Yngvar Folling (yngvar.folling@login.eunet.no)
Date: Thu, 12 Mar 1998 01:29:28 +0100 (MET)

I don't have FAT32, but I can say that I have successfully run a lot of
old DOS and Win3.x applications under Windows NT using the NTFS file
system, which is a far larger diversion from FAT than FAT32 is. The
important thing is mainly that the program must use the normal file
management functions, and not make use of direct disk access.

In article <SFYA1UQy889M092yn@csonline.net>,
bpaddock@csonline.net (Bob Paddock) wrote:

> There is a program called CVT that converts your windows 95
> system to FAT32. What it does is convert the File
> Allocation Tables from 12 bits to some thing larger (16 or
> 32 don't remember which).

Surely this is from 16 to 32 bits? 12 bit FATs are only used on small
diskettes.

> The practical up shot of this is that now a one byte file
> under FAT32 takes only 4K of disk space, where under the old
> FAT it would take 32K of space.

It is not correct to claim that it used 32k, or any particular size. It
depends on the hard disk size. With a 16-bit FAT, the disk is limited
to 2^16 (65536) clusters. The cluster size also has to be a power of 2.

For instance, FAT16 *does* have 4K clusters on disks/partitions smaller
than 256MB.